Oh man can you imagine Yahoo, playing the long game, brings back their user-managed indexes and becomes the dominant search engine again.
Like in the back of a book, or an old subject based card catalogue ... Dewy-decimalise the web :)
I've always felt that an index by subject would be more useful than string-match based searching. Of course, the index might rank links within each sub-sub--sub-sub...category with something like the original page-rank.
Now if Yahoo (or whoever) could avoid the enshitification trap ... imagine what a fabulous resource that could be.
Now that is an awesome idea. I really do think we need to have category-based indexing as well as page search.
Now we can use ChatGPT to filter through Google's infested mess, but this double edged Sword of Damocles will be able to create infinite attempts to bury genuine content with ad spam.
That amount of money is probably more than Google now makes from my online presence because I adblock, block 3rd party cookies, tend to click "block" to everything including the idiotic "legitimate concern" and never ever click on ads.
wow, Search really isn't worth developing.
Edit: not beam but color
Fuck it, I'd pay $15 a year to have a Google search that puts as much effort into finding me the shit I actually want as Google does today in serving me BS ads I never pay attention to.
They announced "Google Contributor" at one point but it never went anywhere
The ads industry would not like their reach to be limited to those not paying for premium search.
Tell me exactly how much the advertiser paid for his placement, and that's a hugely important signal here.
If I'm searching for weird hobby parts, even though it's a high purchase intent query, they're probably paying pennies per click.
But if you start searching, say, financial stuff and the ad placement figures start showing multiple dollars per click, it's a warning "these people are willing to spend THIS MUCH MONEY to present a message to you, this probably means there's something sketchy involved."
I know, for example, anything pertaining to insurance and financial products is highly likely to turn into a farm of cross-selling and personal-information harvesting, because the cost per acquisition is so high and the tendency for everyone to sell the information to everyone else is so great.
Would 3 EUR or even 10 EUR / year for each customer be enough to run operations?
Do you mean self-managed?
Everything else is effectively the influencer scene. Which is increasingly deplorable as well.
Anything with wide enough reach becomes cost-effective for gaming.
So one would have to return to a highly fragmented world to make gaming the system cost prohibitive.
And that would get us to a pre-Internet world. But then again, it’s not entirely unthinkable that we’re headed towards increasing Internet fragmentation if various governments get their way.