Meta-press is a Firefox browser add-on and is free software, accessible for everyone. It’s built with a software architecture which guarantees there are no bottle-necks, no single point of failure and no censorship. Because once you install the add-on in your web browser your requests are not send to a hypothetical Meta-Press server which could control things. Instead, it’s your computer that is instructed how to do the search. It’s your web browser that has gained the superpower to request results from nearly 1000 newspapers. Therefore it is virtually uncensorable because you have plenty news papers on the one side and plenty of computers on the other. And that is how the internet works : no central point that we all have to cross. The more people use Meta-Press the better it will work.

Q: What problems do you see with search today?

A: My main concern with GAFAM news search engines is what I mentioned before: they serve fake newspapers. It is easy to feed GAFAM news search engines with fake content designed exactly to go through their ranking algorithm. And since nobody ever checks, you can fool them. It is possible already possible for you to fool them, so it is for a government or a company. It’s flawed, we need something else. It is bloated, dishonest and not working anymore. And it will only get worse because there is money at stake. And there are political stakes too.

Q: How does Meta-press address these problems?

A: Meta-press addresses the fake news problem because it only searches through sources that are validated by humans. You’re guaranteed to search in real newspapers with articles written by real humans. Humans who were trained and paid for it, which is what we call journalists. This type of information has a price and we should pay that price. If you do not pay for the information you get, than it’s you who is the product sold in the transaction. And you’re not getting the information that you need. So you should pay for the services you use (or run them on your own computer). If you don’t change the way the world is turning, it will continue to turn the wrong way.

There are multiple projects working on free software search engines to make general purpose search available such as YaCy, Searx and Marginalia. They are addressing a difficult problem: how to make a distributed index of the world that is reliable and honest. With Meta-Press we addressed this by limiting our scope to online newspapers. Newspapers provide honest indexes, because their reputation is at stake. With Meta-Press we just stitched those indexes together. This is a small window to the rest of the world with only information created by journalists. But hopefully information that covers the entire world because journalists are looking everywhere.

General purpose indexes are a complicated problem and I am better at solving simple problems. When I started the project it was small compared to Google. But I decided I would pull one hair out of the head of Google. I invite you to do the same. Get your own hair off the head of Google and we will win quite fast. It is my collibri approach to this thing. You address a small part of the problem but you address it well.

Q: What do you think will happen with search in the future?

A: ChatGPT could be the end of Google Search in a year if it continues to rise like this. Not because the results are better. ChatGPT is a stochastic parrot. It has no idea what it says. You can ask it what the French presidents of the Republic are and you get the right list. Ask it who the female presidents are and you’ll also get a list, while no woman ever been French PR yet. Despite that ChatGPT works because it is simple for people to use. That is always what wins (the simplest, not the best).

ChatGPT works with so-called AI algorithms and fortunately for us they are not the same kind of AI as in the Matrix or Terminators movies. It’s just a statistic matrix and this technology, which is 40 years old, can be used for the good of humanity. For instance you have Pl@ntNet. You send it the picture of a plant and it will tell you what plant it looks like. This is access to knowledge. This is the same technology but used in a good way. This is search made well. iNaturalist.org helps you find out which insect you are seeing. BirdNET from Cornell University will tell you what bird you are hearing.

These are examples of online search tools I am the most excited about. They are collaborative efforts. The more you use it, the more accurate it will get. Take Pl@ntNet for instance, if you upload a picture of a rare plant (something that is missing in their database) they will display a pop-up inviting you to upload more photo’s of it once it will be flowering or when the seeds will be fully grown to improve the database. That way humanity works together to get better knowledge of what surrounds us. That looks like the way to go for me. Going to Mars is not an interesting thing to do as long as we don’t have maps of the ocean floors.

Q: Is that how you would like to see search evolve in the future? Becoming more collaborative?

A: Yes. There are two sides of the problem. Is it search that has to be improved? Or is it the way we publish things? Searching for something in a library is easy because it is an organized world. You have shelves, you have books in alphabetical order, that works great. If we publish things better we won’t have a problem searching for them. But hoping that search engines will free us from the efforts to know the world and to sort it, is a bad way to go. Something that won’t work and will catch people in the glue like small birds.

Keep in mind the limits of the dream sold to us nowadays: artificial intelligence is just another algorithm to sort things automatically and we have absolutely no idea of what the content is. Tools won’t solve society’s problems. If humans work together it will be better.

Collaborative efforts to discover the world, to map it, like OpenStreetMap is the way to go. People working together and giving each other knowledge that will help to know the world and to search through it. For instance, you can help Meta-Press mapping the newspapers of the world. It is a collaborative effort. The project is open to all your contributions. Help us to map the world! And thanks to NLnet it will soon be possible for people who aren’t computer science engineers to do this, I promise.

Q: How can we contribute to Meta-Press?

A: You can add your own sources to Meta-Press. On the Meta-Press.es website you find much documentation on how Meta-Press sees the world and how it can read your favorite newspapers. It’s currently a long process available for someone who knows how to make a CSS selector. But with funding from NLnet I am working on an interface in which you will just have to copy paste the address of the source and click to point where is the search engine, where is the title of the results, where is the link, the date and it will be enough.

Once you have this newspaper definition it’s recorded somewhere in Meta-Press and you have a button in the settings to manage your local sources. You will have the JSON object (text) describing how to fetch the results from this source. You can send it by mail to Meta-Press or you can create a pull request on FramaGit.org. You can also reach us via IRC or Mastodon.

Adding sources is the contribution you can do. But every kind of help to the project would be welcome. You can help with translations (which are managed with Weblate.org, a great free software project and enterprise). You can also help the project by just speaking about it. Introduce it to people or to your local university. There are a lot of configurations possible in Meta-Press to search for specific topics or in one language or country (among 75 of them currently). Just try it, use it and make it known.