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Comment by uniqueid | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand why Google’s competitors don’t form an independent search engine. If I were Microsoft, I’d talk to Apple and others to see if they would help fund a spun off Bing.

The internet badly needs a big alternative search engine that isn’t beholden to advertisers or dependent on a single corporate owner.

The benefit of such a search engine (whose main incentive is to just be a good search engine) is obvious for the public, but would also give companies who rely on their own OS leverage against Google.

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...answering my own question: because Google pays these companies off! I almost forgot they pay Apple almost $10 billion to be the default search on iOS.

Conflation of want and need aside how exactly - lets assume they have said niche. How are they going to manage to scale funding to actually provide for it while big?

Paid by user search? Discourage curiosity or just using the alternative.

Deep pocketed sponsor? They have the control now.

User donations are the biggest "maybe" I can see which would be not worse but depends upon charity and campaigning to some degree.

If you mean “conflation of what customers want and what companies need” that is another way to express “customer focus”

If companies like Apple and Microsoft care about providing a great user experience, Google search is risky. I think users would prefer not to see ads when they search, or worry about Google harvesting their data. If this is so, it might be worth it to fund some sort of independent “search foundation.”

I reckon a simple text-only search engine – like Google before it jumped the shark – would actually be quite cheap to develop and operate.

I can tell you from experience that everyday users don‘t care that much about seeing ads. Some even like them. They care even less about the possibility of manipulated results. It’s also a really big topic to explain.

Besides the question of the funding of this hypothetical search engine. It being „fair and objective“ or even completely transparent about its ranking, would mean it‘d be SEO‘d into oblivion by everything from click/content farms to trolls to more nefarious actors. As long as many on the internet want to make money or manipulate people somehow it‘s not really doable in my opinion.

Am I doing your comment an injustice if I paraphrase it as follows?:

- Ads do not adversely affect customer satisfaction.

- The combined forces of Microsoft, Apple and others could not create a serviceable search engine (despite Microsoft alone having already made one).

If not, let’s just agree to disagree :)

Ads are looked at as either a nuisance and necessary evil or just a part of how the „free web“ pays for itself.

I‘m sure they can. And, as you say, MS does already. supported with ads as well unless I‘m mistaken. Are you suggesting they offer a search engine and subsidize it. That they offer it as part of their ecosystem benefits, sort of?

Yes, that’s what I was thinking.

I can’t disagree that users tolerate ads, since advertising is the model of plenty successful websites. It’s just that, like bundled OS crapware, the user experience is better without it.

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