[51785] in Cypherpunks
Re: SurfWatch
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (E. ALLEN SMITH)
Sat Mar 9 19:54:37 1996
Date: Sat, 9 Mar 1996 19:44 EDT
From: "E. ALLEN SMITH" <EALLENSMITH@ocelot.Rutgers.EDU>
To: jsw@netscape.com
Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com
X-Envelope-To: cypherpunks@toad.com
X-Vms-To: IN%"jsw@netscape.com"
From: IN%"jsw@netscape.com" "Jeff Weinstein" 9-MAR-1996 04:41:47.02
> I predict that 6 months after the first internet rating system is widely
>deployed, the largest use of search engines such as altavista will be to
>look for pages with the most "naughty" ratings. Perhaps such services will
>allow text searches for free, but charge for searches based on the rating
>tag...
Unfortunately, AltaVista doesn't index based on comments field (in
which category the SafeSurf ratings fall). Opentext, given that one supposedly
can search for links to a page, may be able to do it on the other hand.
Putting together a web spider that would search for such could be a profitable
undertaking. I did some checking on AltaVista and found one service by the
name of "Naughty Lynx" which automatically checks all of its links every hour
or so - one problem with "adult-oriented" sites is that they disappear a lot.
Some such feature would probably be necessary. Seems to be a good potential
use of the DigiCash system, since one doesn't need merchant anonymnity that
much until someone comes up with anonymous-location web pages; the Naughty
Lynx system appears to support itself via advertising). Combining this with a
web proxy would also be good.
-Allen
