This morning I was thinking about something and wanted to learn more so I turned to the web. I start with Wikipedia, but in this case it was hard to get the kind of answer I was looking for so I turned to DuckDuckGo. What I got in return was an onslaught of garbage composed mostly of AI slop but just as much the typical sort of pre-LLM machine-generated garbage that seems to populate so much of the contemporary web.
...or at least the most indexed parts of it...
I turned next to trusted friends. I should have started with them in the first place because of course anything they give me is something useful (except in the rare cases where one of them says "let me Google that for you...", most of my friends know better than to do that). I started thinking about why I don't just start by asking people about things and I think the answer is simple, I don't want to wait. I think the next answer is that I don't want to bother people if I don't have to, so I try the machine first.
But why not both?
Maybe this is something that personal search engines could help solve? A search engine with an index composed solely of pages that your friend has personally curated may not be as good ask them about something directly, but it would be far better than asking a search engine that contains the entire web, and it's available all the time. It would be a fast and easy way to get a taste of what your friends know about a subject at any time without interrupting them and makes any following-up you do with them more informed (since you will have already "done the reading").
This is an interesting solution to one of the problems I ran into while experimenting with my own personal search engine, that of searching for things you don't already know about. My first attempt to solve this was to add federation, and while it had some aspect of this sort of "personal connection" between nodes, it was intended to be more mechanical and automatic. Perhaps a better approach would be to federate across real, human social networks (as opposed to artificial electronic ones) and when performing a search it is possible to include the personal search indexes of friends you would ask about the subject? It's easy to jump to the conclusion that this could become automatic, or that these results (or the selected results) could be folded into your personal index but I don't want to assume that. Even if it was a manual, dynamic step each time that might be the right way to do it, taking a moment to think about who might be the right person to ask about something.
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026