The many helpful, enriching and valuable aspects of the Internet are overshadowed by a number of serious significant problems. Only recently it had dawned on us how fundamental these problems are. The good news is: there are solutions.
Free offers leading to data dispossession
The problem: Nearly all seemingly “free” internet services are funded by advertisements. The users must agree that their data may be used for sales promotion and sales pitching. To make this possible, all of the users’ web and search activities are recorded and analysed. So the “free” service is actually dispossessing the users regarding their data.
The solution: Users need to get an exclusive ownership of the information that is relevant for the search results. Users must be able to change or delete that information at any time. This ownership of the information needs to be unlimited and should be the basis for the users’ own earnings.
Result order as a black box
The problem: Google now allows the users to see their stored raw data with a few clicks. However, the exact usage of the data remains still unclear; this is treated as a business secret by Google. Thereby the order of the search results and the selection of the advertisements remains a black box. It is also unclear to the users what effects their activities have on the sales pitching.
The solution: A neutral, transparent and democratic platform is needed, based on codetermination, individual respect, and with active shaping of the result order by the users, not the platform owner. This needs to be put into a concept that is democratic as well as financially feasible. Each user can contribute to promote important information, well-grounded opinions, amazing products, fascinating artists, lateral thinking bloggers and much more.
Manipulated Feedback
The problem: Even in the age of the internet, opinions of trustful experts are still crucial for customer decisions and opinion formation. But only on few web platforms it becomes transparent whether genuine experts can be found there.
The solution: The identification of experts for product reviews works relatively well at Amazon by using multiple features like the “helpful” function, the “verified” purchase, badges like e.g. “real name”, “Top-Buyer”, “Hall of Fame” and “Vine Voice”. Similar to Amazon, a multi-level algorithm needs to be used to identify experts. These algorithms should ideally be even more transparent than the ones from Amazon.
SEM, SEA and SEO
The problem: Companies, which want to do Internet based sales can only do expensive search engine marketing (SEM) with search engine advertising (SEA) or search engine optimization (SEO), the latter of which leads to quality deterioration.
The solution: SEM, SEA and SEO in its current way is not needed anymore for PLIDS. For PLIDS, SEM/SEO/SEA are merging and are substituted by a transparent process, which is focused on experts’ evaluation of the quality of the website.
Sharing of Information
The Problem: On social networking sites a vast amount of information is being generated, which often consist of trivial comments which are usually not worth being preserved. However, there is also a great amount of content that had been constructed with care and diligence and that contains valuable information. Making this type of data quickly accessible for research is still only possible in roundabout ways, if at all.
The solution: The user should decide for himself if his shared information should be traceable in a search engine.
PLIDS is the solution
PLIDS has implemented these solutions. PLIDS is therefore the first search engine that has solved the fundamental problems of the internet.