In Search of an Online Utopia

You’re assuming that all your users are rational people.

Most people are, and that’s a wonderful thing to discover.

What’s the next big thing on the Web?

There’s this very overused phrase of Web 2.0, and now people are getting so sick of it that they’re starting to talk of Web 3.0, but I don’t think they really know what it means. What I think about Web 2.0 is that it’s about these kinds of communities and social norms and practices and software that implements. So things like [the photo-sharing Web site] Flickr—the first time I saw Flickr I thought, this is going to be overrun by spam and garbage in no time. And then it wasn’t. And craigslist, which has a community that polices the advertising. That trend is really where we’re headed.

Where does your search project fit in?

There’s an open-directory project called demos.org . This was a project to build a Web index—somewhat successful, but looking at it now it’s very antiquated. Very 1.0. When they had a problem with spammers, they responded in the only way they knew—by a very closed and insular community. Now I think there are better ways. You can create mass participation, you can give that community control in various interesting and subtle ways to empower people to index the Web. That’s what I’m working on.