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Just Devil's Advocate, but how would a pure search engine make money without doing what Google does? Let's suppose a hypothetical Google alternative just purely

Just Devil's Advocate, but how would a pure search engine make money without doing what Google does? Let's suppose a hypothetical Google alternative just purely distributes clicks to organic results. Where does the money to pay for its operation come from? Serious question. I honestly believe that one of the flaws of the current form of the internet is the need for a search engine.

senko 6y ago
That's a false dichotomy. As the GP pointed out, Google started with a symbiotic relationship with the websites. Scraping the content and using it to help people find stuff (and profiting handsomely!) is not the problem. Problem is all other behavior highlighted by GP - pushing organic results below fold, insta-answers totally stopping traffic to sites actually providing that content, and so on. Google is now using its dominant position in search engine market to effectively bundle search with these other things that negatively impact publishers into an "all or nothing" deal. "Don't want us to scrape and show your data? You have nice traffic to your page, it'd be a shame if something were to happen to it..."
- cromwellian 6y ago
  Users want snippets, they want instant answers tho. Just serving 10-blue links, no summary snippet, that forces you to click through and read the page before deciding if it was relevant to you, costs the user both time and bandwidth. If the article is not what I wanted, then you wasted a few seconds of my time that I will never get back, and if I have a metered internet connection, you forced me to load up a lot of junk, eating into my bill, for naught. If I want to look up the current time, or current temperature, or how old Trump is, I don't want to have to be directed to his biography page at the Whitehouse.gov, where I then must skim-read several paragraphs to find it. People are saying "but they're not getting the traffic". Well, facts are not copyrightable, and if all I'm looking for is a small specific fact (answer), then I wasn't interested in a full pageview of your site anyway. Let's say a put 8 hours into writing a programming blog, on say Kotlin, with tutorials and stuff, and someone searches for a question about "which library contains atomics"?, am I supposed to be mad that it answered back "atomicfu" instead of forcing you to read an entire tutorial on Atomicfu I wrote? If the searcher wanted to read a tutorial on atomics, that's what he would have searched for, and likely, he will go examine this library, and then search further about how to use it. To me, the future of search engines is an AI, like GPT-3, that goes out and digests the world, and then lets me ask questions, which it will synthesize brief answers to exactly what I want. In this world, the news publishers will face the same problem of demonetization, and people will be asking their GPT-5 bot "can you summarize what happened yesterday around COVID-19 and the Whitehouse?" News is facing a serous pressure now, but is the right answer to attack summarization technology? It seems it's inevitable that content will be understood and transformed by machines in ways that will be hard to litigate by copyright claims if they spew out original work, and therefore the real question is, in a future of Star Trek like search engines, how can news's basic business model and incentives be transformed? Personally, I agree with Andrew Yang on this, I think a lot of publishing is going to go open source and non-profit, funded by government grants as a basic necessity of democracy, like healthcare, or universal education.

senko 6y ago

That's a false dichotomy. As the GP pointed out, Google started with a symbiotic relationship with the websites. Scraping the content and using it to help people find stuff (and profiting handsomely!) is not the problem. Problem is all other behavior highlighted by GP - pushing organic results below fold, insta-answers totally stopping traffic to sites actually providing that content, and so on. Google is now using its dominant position in search engine market to effectively bundle search with these other things that negatively impact publishers into an "all or nothing" deal. "Don't want us to scrape and show your data? You have nice traffic to your page, it'd be a shame if something were to happen to it..."

cromwellian 6y ago
Users want snippets, they want instant answers tho. Just serving 10-blue links, no summary snippet, that forces you to click through and read the page before deciding if it was relevant to you, costs the user both time and bandwidth. If the article is not what I wanted, then you wasted a few seconds of my time that I will never get back, and if I have a metered internet connection, you forced me to load up a lot of junk, eating into my bill, for naught. If I want to look up the current time, or current temperature, or how old Trump is, I don't want to have to be directed to his biography page at the Whitehouse.gov, where I then must skim-read several paragraphs to find it. People are saying "but they're not getting the traffic". Well, facts are not copyrightable, and if all I'm looking for is a small specific fact (answer), then I wasn't interested in a full pageview of your site anyway. Let's say a put 8 hours into writing a programming blog, on say Kotlin, with tutorials and stuff, and someone searches for a question about "which library contains atomics"?, am I supposed to be mad that it answered back "atomicfu" instead of forcing you to read an entire tutorial on Atomicfu I wrote? If the searcher wanted to read a tutorial on atomics, that's what he would have searched for, and likely, he will go examine this library, and then search further about how to use it. To me, the future of search engines is an AI, like GPT-3, that goes out and digests the world, and then lets me ask questions, which it will synthesize brief answers to exactly what I want. In this world, the news publishers will face the same problem of demonetization, and people will be asking their GPT-5 bot "can you summarize what happened yesterday around COVID-19 and the Whitehouse?" News is facing a serous pressure now, but is the right answer to attack summarization technology? It seems it's inevitable that content will be understood and transformed by machines in ways that will be hard to litigate by copyright claims if they spew out original work, and therefore the real question is, in a future of Star Trek like search engines, how can news's basic business model and incentives be transformed? Personally, I agree with Andrew Yang on this, I think a lot of publishing is going to go open source and non-profit, funded by government grants as a basic necessity of democracy, like healthcare, or universal education.