This is good, but simplistic. Firstly the downfall in the geocities-web came in many phases: 1. Spam Email Phase 2. Phishing / Nigerian phase 3. Popup phase

This is good, but simplistic. Firstly the downfall in the geocities-web came in many phases: 1. Spam Email Phase 2. Phishing / Nigerian phase 3. Popup phase 4. Autoplaying Flash/ActiveX phase 5. Pagerank phase (forums being ruined until rel=nofollow) Now google, previously the main gateway to discovery, is pretty much useless for discovering new non-commercial content. The way this could go away is only from a market shift; deleting your facebook won't bring back geocities. The fact is, if I had a geocities page it'd be undiscoverable due to pagerank, so I have no incentive to publish unless I have another avenue of attention (resume, Hn profile). Can a non-commercial search engine ever exist? I suppose reddit/HN voting is one semi-successful method of content ranking...