Drupal is a general-purpose content-management system (CMS) for running news-and-discussion sites like (to use the most obvious example) Slashdot, though perhaps not such busy ones. I’d been considering toying with something like this for some time, and finally got around to installing it today.

The only hitch in something like this is that you need to set up a MySQL database, which can be intimidating for non-nerds, and configure a file to find that database (which took me a while to get right, mostly because of my inability to follow instructions). But for the most part, installation is a snap. After that comes configuration. Drupal, like many of its ilk, is endlessly configurable, and has numerous add-on modules available. It gets a little tricky because it is based on some rather abstract and non-obvious mental models, and the docs are not as clear as they should be. But after some messing around, I started getting it to do what I wanted it to.

I’ve been using Movable Type for some time now, and that’s become my point of reference. MT is a very sophisticated tool for one kind of task: blogging. Individual content management. MT is narrow but deep. Beyond that, it can be used for wider purposes thanks to its flexibility, but it becomes increasingly difficult to keep up the farther you get from straight blogging.

Drupal, by contrast, is relatively shallow but wide. Blogging is just one module in it, although its blogs are not as sophisticated as MT’s. And in some ways, the customization threshold is higher. MT has its own HTML-like language of tags, so if you can write HTML, you can create your own templates in MT. With Drupal, it seems that you need to know some PHP in order to do more than shuffle around pre-made modules.

Google’s recent buyout of Pyra set the whole blogosphere abuzz, but it also seems to have prodded some people to wonder whether we should worry about Google being too important, too big, too valuable, too secretive.

At Austin’s blogger meetup the other night, Prentiss asserted that private projects like Google and archive.org were too important to leave in private hands (archive.org is basically a hobby of Brewster Kale’s). He suggested that the Library of Congress should be given funding to develop and maintain resources equivalent to these.

Citing privacy concerns, the BBC’s Bill Thompson suggests that Google is “a public utility that must be regulated in the public interest,” and that the British Government should establish an “Office of Search Engines” (or to use his Orwellian term, OfSearch).

Both points have some merit, although both have weaknesses. Regulating a search engine strikes me as a potentially heavy-handed. And if privacy is an issue, I’d be especially unwilling to see the U.S. Government in its current form operating a popular and all-encompassing search engine–that could easily be a back-door to Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness.

So what’s the solution? I’m not sure. But I think that if Google (or to be exact, the services it offers) is too important to leave to Google, it’s too important to leave to any one entity. Better to seed the technology widely. The open-source community might be able to come to the rescue, if it could develop and disseminate smart search-engine code, and license it under strict terms that permitted a nonprofit organization to inspect the books at licensees to make sure they weren’t misusing data they captured, etc. Result-rigging could be caught be setting up a meta-search engine that compared results from different installations of the same engine.

[Later] So how do you come up with a good search engine? Obviously part of the problem is having the bandwidth to crawl the Net frequently and thoroughly. Part of it no doubt comes down to efficient indexing. But perhaps the trickiest is results ranking. I was speculating on ways to refine the matching algorithm, and perhaps a tournament approach would be the way to go.

Here’s what I mean: Develop a bunch of matching algorithms. By default, site users would just see whichever is the preferred algorithm du jour. But willing users could see a “tournament view” where results from two different engines were presented side-by-side. They could then express their preference as to which set of results seemed most useful. With N algorithms, there would be N2-N possible tournament combinations. With a large user base, it shouldn’t be hard to generate meaningful results. This could also be part of the feedback loop in a genetic-algorithm approach, although I don’t understand genetic algorithms well enough to really develop that angle any further.