I agree with your point about search/indexing, but a lot of that has to do with an economic model to fund such a service ... the advertising-driven free models

I agree with your point about search/indexing, but a lot of that has to do with an economic model to fund such a service ... the advertising-driven free models leads towards centralized control and loss of privacy. One interesting way to look at this is the move Apple is making towards more search and cloud services that are funded by device sales, not by advertising and analytics. Decentralized services have tended to suck because you always need at least a federation of centralized servers for search/discovery. But it's possible to do so in a relatively end-to-end secure way, if it can be funded without requiring spying/analytics. Anyway I'm just saying that there's a lot of possibility out there, and the barrier really is one of coming up with a big enough application incentive to force change across multiple areas of the current deployed web.