While people are starting to understand the importance of privacy it is a major hurdle to get them to select a different search engine.
Search engines eat resources like crazy, so operating costs are non-negligible.
Some sites (including e.g. github) use a whitelist in robots.txt, blocking new crawlers.
The amount of spam, link-farms, referrer-linking, etc. is beyond your worst nightmare.
Returning good results takes a long time to fine-tune.
Monetizing is nearly impossible because advertising networks want to know everything about the users, going against privacy concerns.
Buying search results from other search engines is impossible until you have least x million searches/month. Getting x million searches/month is impossible unless you buy search results from other search engines (or sink a lot of cash into making it yourself).
So what do you soylentils think can be done to increase privacy for ordinary users, search-engine-wise ?
This sounds like an old school censorship to me. No wonder politicians are demanding it bent one way or another. Once they started doing it, any authorities request is reasonable.
-- "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday November 22 2018, @01:27AM (2 children)
So, Google degraded to the old time Yahoo?
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by isj on Thursday November 22 2018, @01:43AM (1 child)
Not exactly. From what I can gather they use their ultra-secret ranking algorithm, but then validate/fine-tune it with human reviewers.
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday November 22 2018, @02:30AM
This sounds like an old school censorship to me. No wonder politicians are demanding it bent one way or another. Once they started doing it, any authorities request is reasonable.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.