Community Search Engines

Habitat's road to release: 08 search - building [at] habitat

Bringing search to groups in Habitat!

What and Whose Knowledge? Measuring Epistemic Diversity in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as primary knowledge sources, yet their epistemic diversity - defined as the diversity of real-world claims in their outputs - has never been measured. Low epistemic diversity would pose a risk of knowledge collapse as homogeneous LLMs mediate a shrinking in the range of accessible information over time. The dominant paradigm is that overall LLM diversity is low, but this is always with respect to a single point in time, with no reference baseline or consideration for variation across countries. We address this gap in knowledge by performing the first systematic study of epistemic diversity in LLMs across time and cultural context, testing 27 LLMs on 155 topics covering 12 countries, resulting in 1.7M responses and 70M individual claims. We find that epistemic diversity has increased substantially over the past three years, a positive counter to recent diversity pessimism. However, despite progress, we find that every system is less diverse than a search baseline. This gap is not uniform: RAG can improve diversity, while large models are counterintuitively less diverse than smaller ones. Moreover, LLM parametric knowledge systematically reflects English over local-language knowledge for country specific topics. Together, these results demonstrate that while progress on epistemic diversity is tangible, it is insufficient and unevenly distributed.

Mellon Foundation

The Mellon Foundation makes grants to actively unlock the power in the arts and humanities that helps connect us all.

Axios Media Trends: 🔗 Link economy breaks

Hello! Today's Media Trends, edited by Christine Wang and copy edited by Carlin Becker, is 1,986 words, a 7½-minute read. Sign up.

FR#154 – Search and Community

Fediverse search engine Holos Discover shut down this week, showing structural issues how to distinguish between individual and community consent.

Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today, starts removing 695,000 archive links

If DDoSing a blog wasn't bad enough, archive site also tampered with web snapshots.

Toward People’s Community Control of Technology: Race, Access, and Education

This field review explores how the benefits of access to computing for racialized and minoritized communities has become an accepted fact in policy and research, despite decades of evidence that technical fixes do not solve the kinds of complex social problems that disproportionately affect these communities.

Millions of Volunteers Are Keeping the Internet Human. For Now.

We’re never going back to the human internet we had. But we can hope for a better internet than the AI-dominated one that is emerging, writes Sarah Gilbert.

Bias, Skew, and Search Engines Are Sufficient to Explain Online Toxicity

U.S. political discourse seems to have fissioned into discrete bubbles, each reflecting its own distorted image of the world. Many blame machine-learning algorithms that purportedly maximize “engagement”—serving up content that keeps YouTube or Facebook users watching videos or scrolling through their feeds—for radicalizing users or strengthening their partisanship. Sociologist Shoshana Zuboff15 even argues that “surveillance capitalism” uses optimized algorithmic feedback for “automated behavioral modification” at scale, writing the “music” that users then “dance” to.

Sociotechnical Implications of Generative Artificial Intelligence for Information Access

Robust access to trustworthy information is a critical need for society with implications for knowledge production, public health education, and promoting informed citizenry in democratic societies. Generative AI technologies may enable new ways to access information and improve effectiveness of existing information retrieval systems but we are only starting to understand and grapple with their long-term social implications. In this chapter, we present an overview of some of the systemic consequences and risks of employing generative AI in the context of information access. We also provide recommendations for evaluation and mitigation, and discuss challenges for future research.

Governable spaces: a feminist agenda for platform policy

A proposal, informed by feminist theory, for a policy agenda of “governable spaces” across the domains of social media, gig economies, and network infrastructure.

After the Feed: Trust, connection, and the next era of social technology | New_ Public | May 2026

After the Feed: Trust, connection, and the next era of social technology By Eli Pariser, Co-Director, Angelica Quicksey, Managing Director, Arnobio Morelix, AI Fellow May 2026 Newpublic.org

Collaborative filtering

Collaborative filtering (CF) is, besides content-based filtering, one of two major techniques used by recommender systems. Collaborative filtering has two senses, a narrow one and a more general one.

SoP 2024 Application

Boris Mann's digital garden and personal site.

cblgh/lieu

community search engine

Community historians: scaffolding community engagement through culture and heritage

Focusing on community technology — Eskahlay

A waterwheel, a protocol, and the case for technology that communities can own.

The Age of PageRank is Over

When Sergey Brin and Larry Page came up with the concept of PageRank in their seminal paper The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine (Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, Stanford University, 1998) they profoundly...