The feds are also weighing “less severe” options, such as requiring Google to share data with rival search engines such as DuckDuckGo and Microsoft’s Bing.
Let's not make them a business. Search Engines are fundamental core services for the modern globalized and connected world. It's just like your post-office service. Make it an internationally owned and funded non-profit organization with open-source and the goal of enabling the unrestricted sharing of knowledge over the internet.
What does the creation of a multi-national state owned search engine have to do with Google? I presume nations have the resources to do that all on their own.
What would you suggest the Google search engine be allowed to do to profit as a business?
There's no suggestion. There is currently no way a search engine can be a viable modern business model and a good tool at the same time. It could potentially be a good business model and a decent tool even with ads, but only in a world where we accept that things can't grow forever.
I haven't seen much to suggest Kagi's results are better than Google's. But that's as much a function of time and horsepower as anything.
I would argue that the private model is what's fundamentally wrong with modern search. Nationalize Google and make it a public utility, like any public library or publicly financed research institution. Open up the front end source code and let people apply their own filters and modifications, rather than locking everything down to force feed you sponsored content.
Nationalize Google and make it a public utility, like any public library or publicly financed research institution.
This would be great. Running a search engine is very expensive though.
The Internet Archive is probably the closest thing we've got to something like this. It's a non-profit but AFAIK they don't get any government funding. They've got the scrapers and could probably work on a search engine project, but I doubt they could afford it in their current state. They're spending a lot of money at the moment due to companies filing lawsuits about Internet Archive archiving their content (and a bunch of content is gone from the archive forever as a result
The federal government spends about $1.3B a year on advertising and another $37.5B on data collection, with Google being a major recipient of both budgets. Nationalization would save a small fortune.
And for the economic tailwinds that efficient Internet research provides, I'm willing to bet we'd see significant economic benefits that eclipse the base cost, not unlike with Amtrak or the USPS.
The Internet Archive is probably the closest thing we’ve got to something like this.
Them and Wikipedia, definitely. Both make for excellent models of non-profit free-at-point-of-use information services.
No business in their right mind is going to just disable advertising altogether. There's no other viable way to support a search engine. Google search has been supported by advertising since day 1.
They can fix search without removing advertising. Preventing them from simply paying off others to be the default could be enough.
It defaults you to the Google web suite, where Google makes money on ads. And it harvests your data, which it can then sell to ad agencies as a tool to optimize targeted ad sales.
It doesn't have to be free. People used to pay for licensed software with money instead of their private data. We can do that again, or there's still open source options like Firefox and it's derivatives.
It does have to be free. It's open source software. If they tried to charge money for Chrome, people would just use Chromium or one of the other browsers based on it.
Chromium is open source. Chrome is not. Open source also doesn't mean that you can't charge for the compiled binaries. But that isn't my point. My point is that the reason it's free is that you're actually paying for it through the value of Google tracking and storing everything you do, but as a society have don't have to structure services this way.