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Comment by charlesism | Hacker News Reader

   > Why the second constraint? one might 
   > ask. Besides the obvious potential for 
   > profitability, our mission was

The search engine the world needs is one with independence and non-profitability. If the creators are preoccupied with turning a profit, they’ll introduce the same garbage features as Google. It’s a shame, because a good search engine could shorten the time humanity has to wait for advances (eg: cures for cancers, cheaper energy, etc)

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Indexing the web is a resource intensive activity tho - if it was federated then the resource cost only increases. I suppose a non-profit is the alternative, but non-profits are not exactly independent unless they have some sort of massive endowment. I'm not trying to disagree with you, it's just a paradoxical problem: to resolve the issue, resources must be accumulated. Accumulating resources means it's hard to resolve the issue (of an independent search engine).

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