From: "John Smith" <jsmith58@hotmail.com>
Date: Fri, 8 Aug 1997 15:34:55 +0800
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: Re: "Voluntary Censorship" vs. Govt Legislation
Message-ID: <19970808062547.28652.qmail@hotmail.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Ryan Anderson writes:
>The second thing, and most important, is that web search engines need 
>to
>index *every* page, and allow the topical/categorization system as a 
>way
>to further limit searchs.  

You can't make the web search engines do that.  It's a free country.

What you can do is to avoid the ones which have policies you don't
like.  If Altavista starts listing only rated sites, you can use a
different search engine.

Realistically, the percentage of rated sites is probably going to
stay low for some time.  The big ones will rate, though.  So the
question will be whether most people are happy with the "top 1%"
sites, or whether they want access to the whole web.

It seems to me that if you are using a search engine, you probably
need access to more than just the big commercial sites.  Rogue
indexes which don't block unrated sites may have an advantage just
in terms of usefulness, even aside from the politics.

"John

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