After emailing someone from occupy wall street about the idea and getting a kind response, I am starting to think people aren't understanding the idea. In a sense you could say it is not really a search engine so much as a complex search engine filter. But searching the whole web is an element whether it comes from google or not. It is "like" what is used on reddit.com or digg.com, reddit.com has things divided by topic, and people who ally themselves with, say, anarchism keep themselves and their posts within a topic, but reddit.com's community is not a filter- something that you have the option of using.

More importantly digg.com and reddit.com have only a "like" system, so that the only opinion a person can have and use to vote with is whether they "like" an article or not. All complexity of the peoples voice is reduced to one dimension. My idea uses the like opinion but also gathers a lot more opinions a reader and voter might have about an article, and not in binary but in gradations. In this way it is unlike anything I've seen on the internet. I believe it empowers people to voice their opinions about what they read on the internet and have that voice directly impact the search results of other people. People aren't just talking, they're doing.

This raises an interesting topic of how we could improve the presidential or other election by making the voting more complex than just "vote for" one person. There could be a whole slew of opinions gathered about candidates on the ballot (hopefully more than two candidates) and then these opinions are compiled to ultimately decide who won.


Democratice Search Filter by Nannapat Nightingale is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.