Search is the beginning and the end of the internet. Before search, there was the idea of an organised, hierarchical internet, set up along the lines of the Dewey Decimal system.

Again and again, net pioneers tried to build such systems, but they were always outcompeted by the messy hairball of the real world. As Wikipedia shows, building consensus about what goes where in a big org chart is hard, and the broader the subject area, the harder it gets.

Melvin Dewey didn't predict computers; he also mixed Islam in with Sufism, and gave table-knocking psychics their own category. A full-contact sport like the internet just doesn't lend itself to a priori categorisation.

Enter search. Who needs categories, if you can just pile up all the world's knowledge every which way and use software to find the right document at just the right time?

But this is not without risk: search engines accumulate near-complete indexes of our interests, our loves, our hopes and aspirations. Our relationship with them is as intimate as our relationships with our lovers, our confessors, our therapists.

What's more, the way that search engines determine the ranking and relevance of any given website has become more critical than the editorial berth at the New York Times combined with the chief spots at the major TV networks. Good search engine placement is make-or-break advertising. It's ideological mindshare. It's relevance.

Contrariwise: being poorly ranked by a search engine makes you irrelevant, broke and invisible.

What's more, search engines routinely disappear websites for violating unpublished, invisible rules. Many of these sites are spammers, link-farmers, malware sneezers and other gamers of the system. That's not surprising: every complex ecosystem has its parasites, and the Internet is as complex as they come. The stakes for search-engine placement are so high that it's inevitable that some people will try anything to get the right placement for their products, services, ideas and agendas. Hence the search engine's prerogative of enforcing the death penalty on sites that undermine the quality of search.

It's a terrible idea to vest this much power with one company, even one as fun, user-centered and technologically excellent as Google. It's too much power for a handful of companies to wield.

The question of what we can and can't see when we go hunting for answers demands a transparent, participatory solution. There's no dictator benevolent enough to entrust with the power to determine our political, commercial, social and ideological agenda. This is one for The People.

Put that way, it's obvious: if search engines set the public agenda, they should be public. What's not obvious is how to make such a thing.

We can imagine a public, open process to write search engine ranking systems, crawlers and the other minutiae. But can an ad-hoc group of net-heads marshall the server resources to store copies of the entire Internet?

Could we build such a thing? It'd be as unlikely as a noncommercial, volunteer-written encyclopedia. It would require vast resources. But it would have one gigantic advantage over the proprietary search engines: rather than relying on weak "security through obscurity" to fight spammers, creeps and parasites, such a system could exploit the powerful principles of peer review that are the gold standard in all other areas of information security.

Google itself was pretty damned unlikely – two grad students in a garage going up against vast, well-capitalised mature search companies like AltaVista (remember them?). Search is volatile and we'd be nuts to think that Google owned the last word in organising all human knowledge.