mivox - 7:59 pm on Aug 29, 2002 (gmt 0)

I would hate to see a master, government sponsored search engine. (...snip...) If I had to go through some government employee to get my site listed in a search engine, I doubt I'd ever get listed at all...

Personally, I don't see what the problem is with the idea of a non-commercial 'library' search engine. It's not like he's arguing for shutting down all commercial search engines and making a gov't sposored search service your only option... that would be silly.

If you want a book today, you can choose whether to look in a bookstore or a library. The government does not forbid books on alternate topics from appearing in libraries... in most cases, if a book is donated to a library, it goes on the shelves without any kind of content review beyond what's necessary to properly catalogue it.

The idea of a search service administered by a body of librarians, without any kind of commercial interest, governed by an international organization is precisely to avoid the kind of arbitrary exclusion you're talking about. The administrators wouldn't be beholden to any national government, and wouldn't be reading site content against any kind of political content litmus test prior to inclusion. Their only role would be to analyse the site's content in order to categorize it accurately.

A library often has a wider range of alternative materials than the local commercial bookstore, simply because many books on alternative, unpopular topics, or published by a press without the funds necessary to make a big commercial promotional effort may never make it to the shelves of the bookseller. That's the idea here... a comprehensive international catalogue of internet content un-swayed by commercial OR political interests.

...which may be an impossibly huge task, but that's another debate altogether.