The correct strategy isn’t to hand this over to a giant bureaucracy, but to create an atmosphere where we can have a dozen alternatives to Google.
But at the end of the day the resulting dataset would be sold to third parties so they can rank the results appropriately. Which to me seems to be the only sane way forward. Only a government could run something the scale of the Google crawler and succeed at doing so. And then everyone can build search engines on top of that.
That bit troubles me. If the index is maintained by a government agency, and every search engine is using the same index, then that's a massive censorship avenue. I wonder how "open" Open Web Index is going to be.
The vast majority of the net is, after all, now indexed, so you can run your own indexer to cover whatever they didn't cover.
The only search product that comes close to this is Amazon search or booking.com (or maybe YouTube).
All multi billion dollar businesses. And when smaller ones emerge like the flight scanner one, google buys them.
I don’t see google going anywhere soon. They have a lot of faults but they’re still too good.
What is so great about those search examples?
However, there's no way Geizhals will ever expand into general search. The reason why they are so much better than the competition is that they are focussing on a small, profitable niche and presumably use manual data entry to ensure they have the best data.
[1]: there's a UK version too "skinflint.co.uk"
I don't think I've seen a website that does that before and I think it's worth praising.