I used Ecosia (of planting trees fame) to find the list of failed search engines. The first result is a Wikipedia category page that lists 81 of them [1]. Fair

I used Ecosia (of planting trees fame) to find the list of failed search engines. The first result is a Wikipedia category page that lists 81 of them [1]. Fair to say that people have tried. Hard. If feels unlikely that there will ever be another search engine. That product category is basically done. There is obviously much excitement about the potentially disruptive role of LLM. Its a powerful alternative algorithmic interface to public information but both its tenuous relation with facts and ultimately it being based on the same adtech business model means the end-result might have to be massaged and be quite a bit less disruptive than what people think or hope. It is hard to say where true disruption will come from. Its probably not going to be called "search" but it must make search obsolete. I don't know how widespread that feeling might be, but I'm tired "searching". I don't want my interface to the world to be a daily grind defined by adtech optimizations. We need a new interface to information. More persistent, more tailored, more user-centric, and obviously, more private. For that we need to go back to the roots of the web and maybe even before that, the roots of computer user interfaces. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_internet_search_engines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_internet_sear...