> in some cases unavoidable
That something is sometimes true is not an argument why it automatically is true in a particular case.
That's what google gives me by default:
https://www.google.com/search?q=bill+hicks+about+marketing&i...
Yet removing the crap works perfectly fine, so how is having that crap unavoidable?
https://www.google.com/search?q=bill+hicks+about+marketing
https://www.google.com/search?q=bill+hicks+about+marketing&s...
In contrast, out of the gate:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=show+me+some+sanity&ia=definition
It's a pity it redirects to add "&ia=definition", but it's nearly pretty. And if this didn't blow your mind yet, if you right-click a search result to copy the URL, you get the actual URL with DDG, not an abomination of an URL that redirects you via Google to the URL you thought you copied (and which, to add insult to injury, gets masked when hovering over the link in the status bar, like a malware page might do it).
Sure, that's "unavoidable" if you want to track more stuff, but wanting to track more stuff in itself is not unavoidable. It'a choice.
> Not to mention that making a API call every time you need to do something as basic as backtracking on your search is just pure insanity when it comes to resourcing.
That's exactly what Google does though. It would be perfectly possible to let stuff be cached in the browser at least for a few minutes, but there is always requests being made. They throw away those user and server resources to track hits. It's a bit like YouTube used to buffer and allow skipping back and forth without having to load one more byte, and now doesn't. There's ads to display and usage statistics to gather. Which you might argue they need that to "improve their product", but I think looking at, thinking about and using a product can get you a long way, too. If you need to see how real people use it, pay them to use it while you record them. Yeah, I know, it would ruin everything and we'd be left with Pong, right? Baby food manufacturers could also improve their products if they could experiment on thousands of babies without any restrictions, and I bet if that was the norm, any reform would be met with visions of doom about toxic baby food.
Right now, nothing companies like Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft could invent would be nearly as cool as a simple, efficient web with users educating other users how to use it responsibly. If the web was plumbing, we'd be looking at people making all sorts of weirdly shaped pipes out of fancy materials, and people would sell their plumbing skills by talking about their religion and family, instead of time and materials needed, and capacity and stability of the result. We're still at the level of people burying slaves at the foot of a new aqueduct, and I can't wait until this hysterical gold rush is a mere footnote in the history of an actual information age. Right now we live in the marketing age, and the mediocrity is a direct result IMO.