Public search engine is not an isolated, academic problem to solve - it's a never-ending war against large economic interests that want to undermine it. This dy

Public search engine is not an isolated, academic problem to solve - it's a never-ending war against large economic interests that want to undermine it. This dynamic has huge implications. People imagine Google without ads will be better or paid search makes it better - they are mistaken, since the moment Google (or any top search engines) completely stops serving any ads (or equivalent - everyone using ad block that blocks search ads), all of the companies spending money on ads will instead spend those money on SEO against those search engines. i.e. Selling ads is an effective way to limit the amount of money poured into SEO. As long as the cost of ads is lower than the amount you need to spend on SEO to get the similar amount of traffic through organic results, companies would rather buy ads. This adds more incentive for Google and other search companies to focus on fighting against SEO manipulations also, since a successful SEO effectively lowers the ad price companies are willing to pay. Paid search would make this problem actually worse - people who can afford to pay correlate strongly with the target demographic companies want to show ads, and that means once people starts signing up for paid search, companies will throw more money at SEO. Now, the doomsday scenario (of SEO winning and all organic results becoming bad) may happen anyway because SEOs end up winning regardless despite Google and other search engines fighting against it. For humanity's sake, we better hope that's not how it ends up. It's less likely given some of the structural advantage search engines have, but SEOs have advantages too, so at this point it's not at all clear one side will necessarily win or lose.