Why Google cannot avoid Doom (but Open Source can)

Here's again the questions that I hope we can discuss together :)

- If you could create your own search index (which you can redistribute, resell as you please) for let’s say up to 200 domains, updated weekly, would you pay $100 monthly for that?

- Do you think someone could run a 10000 subscribers x $1 monthly Patreon to maintain a search index of mainstream news websites?

- Would you rent and set up a $20 monthly VPS to host your own ad-free private federated search engine for yourself and your friends and family?

- Would you consider hosting a public search engine with ethical ads if you had free access to the necessary software and an affordable way to subscribe to the data?

- Do you think it is possbile to set up a company which will be financially self-sufficient (i.e. no dependence on ads) and produce the necessary data?

- If the opportunity was there, would you set up such a company to populate an emerging market of ethically uncompromised search data providers?

- This seems like it would benefit the greater good. Are there any government subsidies for this kind of stuff?

I think the doom of Google is highly exaggerated. But true that the quality of their primary service has degraded. But I don't even think it is SEO, far more annoying are "trusted news source". Perhaps they have the best SEO, but I think it is more about being buddies with the press for access. Some effects are outside their influence like Discord becoming prominent for content, which severely limits discoverability. IRC had the same problem, but it was often flanked by forums for specific topics.

I get that Discord is convenient, but you have some side effects not many people think about. Especially developers for games would really profit from another platform. Reddit for example has many benefits just because it is discoverable by search engines.