> Is it the log & clickthrough data? It's a huge advantage and critical ingredient for ranking in all major websearch engines as far as I know. Google gets bil

> Is it the log & clickthrough data? It's a huge advantage and critical ingredient for ranking in all major websearch engines as far as I know. Google gets billions of queries and clicks every day. Your startup? Pretty much none of that. How are you going to train your ranking algorithm with no data? > Imagine the privacy advocate conniptions if that were open-sourced. AOL got in huge trouble when they open-sourced their click-logs circa 2002. Right, logs with such level of detail as individual user sessions would never get public for this reason, too much legal risk. But even simple aggregated datasets of the form "how many clicks did this query-url pair get" would be very useful to bootstrap a competitor and can be anonymized much more effectively.