My favorite parts of the internet have no relation to ads or commerce at all.... including wikipedia. When you’re looking for information commerce is a massive distraction.
sadly true, but an open source engine like searx could be made to do such a thing
How could it be sustained? Search engines are expensive to run.
It could be a subscription service.
The real cost is in the infrastructure needed to run it unless you go full P2P
P2P it is then!
Yes, Search could use some Bittorrent-like disruption.
I wonder though - is too much of the P2P universe now mobile devices instead of regular computers that it wouldn’t be feasible?
P2P can be done on mobile but you're fighting against limited resources (storage, bandwidth, CPU). The reason P2P got good on PC is because storage got cheaper, bandwidth was increasing and CPUs kept getting faster.
Right. So texting on P2P is easy and appropriate, but I can’t see how building a search engine on P2P would really work well given those limited resources.
It's important enough, and currently wastes enough of my time (read: SEO crap, Medium and Reddit are top results for... everything) that I'd happily pay for a good search engine!