The Open GRiD Project
Frequently Asked Questions

General questions.

• What and Why is this project?
• Why should I bother reading it?
• What does the name "Open GRiD" stand for?
• Why do we need this? Aren't current search engines and directories enough?

Related things.

• What is the "prerequisite knowledge" for reading this?
• What are the related articles?
• What is the connection between the Open GRiD Project and Linux/free (open source) software?
• How are these ideas related to/improve on the current search engines and directories?
• Does there exist anything close to what you are proposing?

The proposed ideas.

• What is shortly the thing you are proposing?
• What are the main benefits of implementing the Open GRiD Project?
• What are those global implications you were talking about?
• Are there any completely new kinds of searches possible as a result of implementing the Open GRiD Project?
• How do you see the future regarding implementation of the Open GRiD Project?
• What did others say/do about the Open GRiD Project?
• What is to be done?

Whether the Open GRiD Project implemented is better than what we currently have.

• Doesn't your method restrict the set of sites that can be found?
• Won't it be very difficult for a new site to get a high rank? to be found?
• Isn't it scary that everybody will be "watching" everybody?
• Isn't there a danger in fast implementation of the Open GRiD Project?
• Isn't all of this some sort of communism?

Whether the proposed ideas can actually work.

• Won't those opinion-links be unreliable/subjective/not reflecting the reality?
• Won't it be too complicated for ordinary people to create those voting links?
• Won't those opinion-links be just misused/abused by big corporations?
• Isn't it hard/impossible to change the HTML standard in the proposed way?
• Won't it be impossible to create a search engine for the Open GRiD Project?
  (without backing from some big company)?
• When can it be started? When can it be "done"?
• I don't have to do anything if I wish to see the Open GRiD Project implemented; I can just wait, right?

How do I...   Can I...

• I like this idea, what can I do to help?
• Can I distribute/copy documents from this site?
• I have a comment/opinion about the site or the project, how do I make it known to others?
• How do I find out about the latest news regarding the Open GRiD Project or its evolution so far?
• How can I contact the author of this site?
• Are there mailing lists or a forum devoted to the Open GRiD project?

Suggestions of new questions for the FAQ are appreciated.

This is a project to implement a new searching, categorization, and ranking architecture for the Web much better than the currently available ones (including Google and the Open Directory) and that should have deep global implications on many other areas.

These documents describing the project have been made available to you, Dear Reader, because they contain ideas that I believe must be widely known and because it is important that you read these documents.

I think *everyone* would like to use a search engine better than the ones currently available.

Also I guess most of the people personally would like to use/benefit from other things that are offered by ideas of the project. (See question "What are the main benefits of implementing the Open GRiD Project?")

But the point is that the ideas of the project can not be implemented and brought to public in a ready-to-use form by a tiny group of people: small efforts of many different Internet users are required. That's why it is important that you read these documents.

I think limitations of the current search engines (and directories) are apparent to anyone who has tried to use them to find something non-trivial.

A simple argument why current search engines and directories aren't adequate is this:

Each current search engine or directory (i.e. its principles) is created, controlled, and maintained by a small group of people; whereas the Web is created and maintained by all the people over the World who create the Web pages. (Even the Open Directory is still very much controlled by the small group of people who started it: see section "Human-Maintained Directories".)

This document, in contrast, offers a way to build a global consistent searching, categorizing, and ranking architecture (Open GRiD) that is contributed to, maintained, and controlled collectively by all the people who surf and create all the Web pages.

The problems of current search engines and directories as well as existing approaches for solving them are discussed in sections "The Problem" and "Towards a Solution".

This section just lists the sources; links to these sources are also present in the main document (mostly close to the place where the source is needed).

The reader is expected to be familiar with the general principles of the current search engines.
A good site for such information is the Search Engine Watch (http://searchenginewatch.com/); especially these pages:

• How Search Engines Work
  (http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/work.html)
• How Search Engines Rank Web Pages
  (http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/rank.html)
• Counting Clicks and Looking at Links
  (http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/9808-clicks.html)
• Directories Take Center Stage
  (http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/9805-directory.html)
• Yahoo: Delays Expected
  (http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/yahoo/delays.html)

Also some experience with Google search engine (http://www.google.com/) and familiarity with its principles (http://www.google.com/more.html and http://google.stanford.edu/google_papers.html) will be a plus.

Some familiarity with the phenomena of Linux (http://www.linux.org/), GNU (http://www.gnu.org/), and open source software (http://www.opensource.org/) is assumed.

Familiarity with the Open Directory (http://dmoz.org/ and http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/WWW/Directories/Open_Directory_Project/) is a plus.

Familiarity with the related articles listed next is also a plus.

A (definitely incomplete) list of such papers follows:
• These papers have many ideas and implications similar to what is proposed to be done in the Open GRiD project; the only thing that is missing in most of them is how to actually build all those things that are described.
  • Message Rating System Proposal, by Alexander Chislenko
    (http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/articles/MessageRating.html)
    A proposal (first draft is of 1991) to use opinions of users in order to optimize information traffic to the user according to his/her personal interests.
  • Automated Collaborative Filtering and Semantic Transports, by Alexander Chislenko
    (http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/articles/ACF.html)
    Another article talking about automated collaborative filtering of information using opinions of many people; the article especially covers some social, historical, philosophical, and practical aspects of using automated collaborative filtering.
  • Newsfilter project: Structure and task list, by Alexander Chislenko
    (http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/newsfilter_plan.html)
    An architecture proposal for a system supporting the use of user assessments in order to filter Usenet messages.
  • Semantic Web; vision paper, by Alexander Chislenko
    (http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/articles/SemanticWeb.html)
    An authors vision of "semantic/content-aware/intelligent Web".
• The World-Wide Web as a Super-Brain: from metaphor to model, by Francis Heylighen and Johan Bollen
  (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/papers/WWWSuperBRAIN.html)
  Some interesting ideas on how the Web can help building a collaborative intelligent system (Super-Brain) composed of all the Web users.
• Algorithms for the self-organization of distributed, multi-user networks. Possible application to the future World Wide Web, by Johan Bollen and Francis Heylighen
  (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/papers/SelfOrganWWW.html)
  Some ideas and experiments on how to help the Web in self-organization and self-improvement using collaborative efforts of many Web users.
• The Transparent Society, by David Brin
  (http://crit.org/openness/sourcedocs/BrinCh1.html)
  An very interesting article arguing that transparent society (i.e. a society with *very* free and open information flows) might be the only way to go in the near future.
• CritSuite, Critical Discussion Tools for the Web
  (http://crit.org/)
  A site providing its users with the ability to comment on any Web page and view the comments made by others as well as the information about backlinks to the page (the underlying software is available).
  The main drawback is that the used implementation is completely not scalable: all opinions are stored on a central server; all Web page requests go through the same server used as a proxy; there is no mechanism to rank the comments, hence with a large number of users the system basically becomes useless.
• Directories: Bread Crumb Trails Across the Web, by L. Michelle Johnson
  (http://www.alistapart.com/stories/directories/index.html)
  An article criticizing current search engines and directories as being too biased and too money-making oriented, and calling for creation by the "masses" of many sites with specialized mini-directories.
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar, by Eric S. Raymond
  (http://tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/)
  A paper describing how free (open source) software projects work and what are their differences from traditional closed small team projects.
• Homesteading the Noosphere, by Eric S. Raymond
  (http://tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/homesteading/)
  A paper about how and why free (open source) software development communities work the way they work.
• Preserving the Information Ecosystem, by Steve Adler
  (http://freshmeat.net/news/1998/11/21/911655450.html)
  An editorial viewing the Web as environment of "Total Freedom of Information Exchange" and talking about how this environment is related to free software movement.
• Open Source and Change, by Jeremy Lee
  (http://slashdot.org/features/98/11/16/1446250.shtml)
  A paper about social implications of free (open source) software development model.
• Halloween Documents, annotated by Eric S. Raymond
  (http://www.opensource.org/halloween.html)
  Annotated Microsoft's leaked memos discussing free software and Linux.
• Counting Clicks and Looking at Links, by Danny Sullivan
  (http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/9808-clicks.html)
  A review paper describing and comparing new searching techniques of Google, Clever, and Direct Hit.

As stated in the abstract, the proposed idea is a technical way to bring to the whole Internet the benefits of peer review and peer recognition that are successfully used by Linux/free (open source) software developers community (see the papers listed in the previous question).

Section "The Degree to Which Such Opinion Forming System can be Biased" talks more about it; in particular, it offers an explanation why Linux has been so far a system more for a computer expert than for an ordinary user.

The methods proposed describe a way to build a global ranking search engine and directory (GRiD) that should be much better than and combining the benefits of Google search engine (http://www.google.com/) and the Open Directory (http://dmoz.org/) categorizing directory.

Section "How the Proposed Solution is Related to What We Know" talks more on the relation of the proposed methods and the existing search engines and directories (which are discussed in section "Towards a Solution").

Yes: "As one can see the proposed ranking principle is just an extension and globalization of the way our society determines the value of anything for any particular purpose."

Sections "How the Proposed Solution is Related to What We Know" and "Existing Partial Implementations of the Proposed Solution" cover this question more extensively.

See also question What are the related articles?

The document proposes a way to create a consistent distributed global searching, categorizing, and ranking Internet structure (Open GRiD) that is contributed to, maintained, and controlled collectively by all the people who surf and create the Web.

Technically what is proposed, is a small change of the HTML standard that lets people easily state their opinions about the information on the sites they create links to.

These opinions include the category to which the site belongs and the rank of the site in that category according to the person making the link.

The opinions are weighted according to the author's reputation in a field, which in turn is also determined by such weighted opinions of all the people that have expressed them.

Basically, it is a global many-category ranking system with a self stabilizing and self enhancing peer review feedback.

The simple and uniform way of stating these opinions makes it easy to create a search engine and directory that can aggregate all these individual opinions in different ways and provide the results utilizing this collective knowledge to everyone.

See section "The Proposed Solution" for more general information and see "The Open GRiD Project Architecture Proposal" for (a draft of) technical specifications. See also the next question.

• Searching-wise:
  • Much more accurate search results that utilize the knowledge/work of many previous surfers.
  • Absolutely new kinds of searches are possible (see "Are there any completely new kinds of searches possible as a result of implementing the Open GRiD Project?" question).
  • Automatic creation of accurate categorizing directories for virtually all sites on the Web.
  • Automatic creation of accurate comparative ratings of sites.
• Democracy-wise:
  • The ability for everyone to easily voice, make heard, and find out about opinions on virtually any topic.
  • The benefits of peer review and peer recognition can be easily brought to all the fields of human pursuit represented on the Web.
• Monopoly-wise:
  No way to create a monopoly in many fields, in particular a monopoly controlling Internet searching (access to Web content).
• Effort-waste-wise:
  The results of efforts of many people for reviewing and looking for some information are readily available to others, and hence do not have to be repeated again and again.
• Global implications in other fields:
  See the next question.

Shortly, some of such implications are:
• Only fair tactics win (survive) in all areas represented on the Web.
• Reputation of a person is solely determined by the person's achievements.
• Very fair competition in industry.
• "Ultimate" democracy.
• Progress acceleration.
(Follow the links for more details, but note that these sections assume that you have read most of the preceding sections.)

Yes: For example one will be able to search for:
• Good sites according to different categories of people evaluating the sites: all users, experts in the field, authors of the site itself.
Sites influencing the rank of a given site: that is, sites supporting or opposing the ideas expressed on the site in question.
Only such sites about which there are sufficiently many (or few) opinions expressed by diverse categories of sites.

Section "The Proposed Solution" gives more examples of possible searches.

I think that it was inevitable that somebody comes up with an idea similar to the Open GRiD Project at some point in the evolution of Internet; and it is inevitable that this idea is widely disseminated and implemented once made sufficiently known.

Section "Inevitability, Possible Future Scenarios" cover this topic in more detail.

Section "Means to Find Out About Current Degree of Acceptance of the Open GRiD Project" lists several ways to find out what others have said/done regarding the document. (Including just looking at section "What People have Said About the Open GRiD Project".) See also the mailing lists archives.

Section "What *You* Can Do Now" (especially subsection "Concrete Things to be Done") contains some easy things one can do to help the Open GRiD Project.
One very important such thing right now, is to make this document widely known.

The other important thing is to implement the project: see "The Open GRiD Project Architecture Proposal", the development mailing list activity, and the Software Download Page.
Also, section "Possible Extensions and Topics to Discuss and Settle On" lists some technical details that have to be clarified and decided on.

No, it does not: The ability to find high ranked sites does not mean that one can not search for (find) sites with low ranks. In fact, one can explicitly search for low ranked or "underestimated" sites. Section "The Proposed Solution" says more about this.

Maybe, but it will be still *easier* than it is now:
The ranks and categorizations will be generated by many independent people whose reputation depends on the correctness of the ranks and categories they assign.
That's why it will be easier to get a fair rank and categorization comparing for example to how hard it is now for a new site to just get listed in appropriate category in Yahoo!
See also section "The Problem of How an Unknown New Idea Gets Attention".

Also as indicated in the answer to the previous question, one can specially search for (new) sites about which there are not many opinions expressed yet.

No: This is essentially what we currently have: a value/reputation of a person is determined by opinions of other reputable people. (See also the beginning of section "How the Proposed Solution is Related to What We Know".)

Also others will be able to "watch" only the opinions that one makes public him/herself. (See section "Using Your Reputation to Increase the Importance of Your Opinion Versus Preserving Your Anonymity" for more details.)

Another point it that it will be very hard to misuse/abuse the ability to "watch" others because *everyone* will be "watched" by many different independent people. (See also section "The Degree to Which Such Opinion Forming System can be Biased".)

The Transparent Society article (http://crit.org/openness/sourcedocs/BrinCh1.html) argues that the degree of being "watched" is steadily increasing in the society and the only question is whether everyone or a privileged groups of people will have access to such "watching" facilities.

No: It is just impossible to implement the proposed ideas instantly. See section "The Speed of Spread of the Open GRiD Project" for details.

Each individual such opinion-link will be definitely subjective.
But *all these links combined* are the most objective thing one can ever hope to get (if there are sufficiently many such links).

The following sections provide more arguments supporting this: "Towards a Solution", "The Proposed Solution", "Existing Partial Implementations of the Proposed Solution", "The Degree to Which Such Opinion Forming System can be Biased".

No: It can be easily done so that creating such an opinion-link is no harder than creating a bookmark (see section "Easy Vote Creation" for details).

The fact that people will create those voting links is proved by the number of editors of the Open Directory (http://dmoz.org/) and especially by the rate of the growth of that number.
See section "Willingness of People to Use Such Voting Links" for more details.

No: It will be impossible as long as such a corporation is not able to fool/influence *all* the people on the Web who care about the accuracy of information about this corporation/the opinions in question (see section "The Degree to Which Such Opinion Forming System can be Biased" for more arguments).

No: "This is not impossible at all because HTML standards are not controlled by any single commercial organization that might had been unwilling to do such a change."
See section "The Possibility of Changing the HTML Standards in the Proposed Way" for more.

No: The existence of Google search engine (http://www.google.com/) and the way it was built shows that the current level of technology is enough to create a search engine we need for the Open GRiD Project without very large monetary and research resources.

See "The Open GRiD Project Architecture Proposal" for the current status of implementation of the project.

Section "Possible Financial Resources For and Around the Open GRiD Project" argues that there should be enough financial resources for the project, because its popularity is a precondition for its implementation.

See also section "What has been Done".

The Open GRiD Project has been started by letting more people to know about it and by working on its implementation (see "The Open GRiD Project Architecture Proposal" and "The Software Download Page").

See section "What *You* Can Do Now" (especially subsection "Concrete Things to be Done") for more details on what you can do to help.

Apparently there is no state of the project when it is "done".
But one will be able to get meaningful/accurate search results by means of the project as soon as there are sufficiently many different independent opinions expressed on the searching topic in question.

Abstractly speaking, yes: the implementation of the Open GRiD Project (or something similar to it) should be an inevitable result of the evolution of the Internet.

But practically speaking, no: the more each person reading this does to help the Open GRiD Project (which is currently to inform others about it and participate in its development), the faster it will be implemented and available for use:
"The point is that the Open GRiD Project can not be realized by one person or by a small group of people without some support of many people. Active participation of many different people in adoption and use of the project is a necessary precondition for it to come true."
(See section "What *You* Can Do Now" for more details.)

Make more people aware of the Open GRiD Project.

Participate in the development and implementation of the project (see "The Open GRiD Project Architecture Proposal").

See section "What *You* Can Do Now" (especially subsection "Concrete Things to be Done") for more options and details.

Yes: these documents are basically provided under GNU General Public License (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html). See section "Copyright Notice" for more information.

E-mail them to the author of the site, participate in the mailing lists, or create a Web page with your opinions and send a link to the page to the author of the document.

The Open GRiD Project News and History page provides this information.

You can also subscribe to news and announcements mailing list.

See section "On Sending E-mails to the Author of This Document".

Yes, there are three mailing lists with browseable archives:
• OpenGRiD: list for general discussion and questions about the project.
• OpenGRiD-News: moderated list mainly for important news and announcements about the project.
• OpenGRiD-Devel: list for development discussion and coordination among developers and testers regarding implementation of the project.

To view archives go to:


http://www.onelist.com/archives.cgi/OpenGRiD
http://www.onelist.com/archives.cgi/OpenGRiD-News
http://www.onelist.com/archives.cgi/OpenGRiD-Devel

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	First posted on Jan. 23, 1999 and last updated on Dec. 17, 2000 by Maxim Lifantsev
	Comments, Suggestions?