As part of Open-Search, I was invited to participate in the Forum on Quaero at the Jan van Eyck Acadamie in Maastricht, September 29 and 30, 2007. The purpose of the forum was to question and investigate the European intentions to build a search engine and, broader, to investigate the cultural, political, and philosophical issues related to information search and access. It turned out to be a critique on centralized search engines and a plea for systems like Open-Search: decentralized, open and privacy respecting. My elaborate report and impression of the two day forum on Quaero can be read at the Open-Search Blog.

About a year ago Richard Rogers, Marieke van Dijk, and I made the Issue Dramaturg, a tool to display a site’s Google rank per query. Today, whilst preparing for the public form on Quaero I checked our query on 9/11 again. Every day we query Google for 9/11 and see which sites have what rank for that query. Normally 911truth.org has a very high rank in Google for this query. Since the 17th of September 2007 however, their rank has declined very fast. On the 20th of September 911truth.org completely disappeared from Google! 911truth.org is an important source for information about 9/11. According to Wikipedia,

[911truth.org,] The 9/11 Truth Movement is the name adopted by the loosely-connected organizations and individuals that question the mainstream account of the September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States. [...] The common proposition among all of the movement supporters is that what they call “the official account” of the events of 9/11 is not true, and that the truth has been covered up by high-level officials and the official investigators.

Below you can find a screenshot of the Issue Dramaturg documenting the decline in Google rank for 911truth.org:

911truth.org itself says this about it:

It seems absolutely clear Google has purposefully removed 911truth.org from their search engine. Is this the same Google whose mission statement includes the goal “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Uhm, maybe only sort of universally accessible?

… Talking about a well documented case of Google censorship… I am constantly reminded why we started Open Search - a distributed peer to peer search engine which is set up to avoid search engine manipulation, censorship and profiling.

Cross posted on Masters of Media weblog

We were sent an invitation to talk on the Forum on Quaero in Maastricht because the

Open-Search model offers a feasible and imaginative alternative to the very issue of profit and property - and the resulting politics - apparent in commercially operated search engines now. Conditions that deserve to be mistrusted and investigated (like your practice is doing) once an internet tool, like Google, gets increasingly perceived as ‘neutral’ or part of the given infrastructure of a system. Instead, citizens need to be made aware that here, choices are to be made, and can be made.

Besides the well phrased mission of Open-Search, the conference looks very interesting.
(more…)

HollandOpen Conference, June 11 and 12, Amsterdam.

With contributions from Florence Devouard (Wikimedia foundation), Chikai Ohazama (Google Earth), Jim Ayre (European Schoolnet), Guillermo Caudevilla (Vodafone), Antony Satyadas, (IBM), Jason Levitt (Yahoo), Steve Coast (OpenStreetMap) and many many others (incl a poster session of open-search)!

Alpha release of open-search

When: Saturday April 28, 2007, 13.00h CET, 11.00h GMT, 06.00h EST, 14.00h EET, 01.00h HST, 04.00h MST
Duration: official program will be 4 hours
Where (physical): CREA, room 204, Turfdraagsterpad 17, 1012 XT Amsterdam (route)
Where (virtual): through the SecondWorkshop page
Cost: free attendance, free drinks
More info: http://www.open-search.net/Opensearch/SecondWorkshop

If you can hold a keyboard, you should be at this workshop!

The open-search project proposes to build a distributed, peer-to-peer, search-engine. By combining the already existing technologies of peer-to-peer file storage, distributed crawling and peer-to-peer searching, we hope to solve the problems inherent to a centralized search-engine: manipulation, censorship and profiling.

After a period of contemplation and reflection, the open-search project is ready for some serious hacking and discussion. If you have any programming skills, analytic skills, interface design skills or other skills that you can use to contribute to the open search project, we have todo list items with your name on them! Those concerned with the legal and policy details of the project are also welcome for the non-technical track, to discuss policies, legal issues, issues of deployment and ideology versus users.

Virtual attendance will be possible through on-site A/V streaming and internet relay chat (IRC, a web interface will be provided for those unfamiliar with IRC clients). The details will be posted on the workshop page shortly. If you can not be present physically, you don’t have to miss this workshop. The chat will be projected on a large screen during the workshop.

The preliminary program for this workshop is:

1. 1. an overview of our current progress and the current state of the client (by Robin, our main developer)
2. 2. hands-on: there will be an install party to get the thing running on everybodies computer (bring your laptop)
3. 3. hands-on: after installation the workshop will continue in two tracks:
   • technical: discuss, plan and code
   • theoretical: discussion about and planning of activities related to p2p research, law (with guidance of Joris van Hoboken), motivation (elaboration on WhyOpenSearch), community activation

impakt: Zaterdag 31 maart, 14.00 Refter Centraal Museum Utrecht

Zowel democratiseringsbewegingen als repressieve regimes erkennen de waarde van het internet. Totalitaire regimes proberen de controle over hun onderdanen en het internet te vergroten. Vooral China trekt hierbij de aandacht. Volgens Amnesty International oefenen ook de overheden van onder andere Iran, Turkmenistan, Israël, Saudi Arabië, Syrië en Vietnam repressie en censuur uit op het internet.

In deze couch.club komen ‘cyber-dissidents’ aan het woord, wordt de technische kant van internetcensuur besproken en worden er projecten gepresenteerd die zich tegen internet censuur weren.
Met Koen Martens en Erik Borra (open-search.net), David Danish (in Iran geboren schrijver, journalist en Midden-Oostendeskundige), Yan Ting Yuen (greatfirewallofchina.org) en Nick Dearden (irrepressible.info / Amnesty International UK).

In het panel gaat het om vrijheid van meningsuiting én artistieke vrijheid en dan specifiek in relatie tot het internet:
- de bedreigingen (hoe repressie regimes er controle op proberen uit te oefenen)
- en de kansen (hoe kunstenaars en activisten het internet kunnen gebruiken)