Just a warning, this text is both fairly dated with its description of how the search engine works, and fairly incomplete. Was just today thinking about expanding on it.

There's a lot to be said about how search engines not only mediate the Internet as it exists, but actually shape what gets created. If you want free and independent websites, you need a free and independent internet mediator that lets people find and partake in such a community online. That is not Google, nor Reddit, nor Facebook, nor Twitter.

Right now, while a sort of stubborn counter-culture exists in the fringes of the internet, it's just a shadow of what the internet could be. Small websites just can't compete against the SEO-industry on Google. So they're almost impossible to find, and struggle to find visitors. It's a real tragedy how many brilliant and fascinating websites are languishing in obscurity. Instead we get listicles, content farms, click funnels.

I think ultimately, for the sake of both culture and democracy, what we need is a service akin to a public library, to complement the shopping mall that is Google Search. (Although even the commercial side of search is pretty lacking, but that is a separate problem)