My experience with both DDG, which I use as default, and Google, which I use as backup has been steadily deteriorating over time.
That is the opposite of what you would expect if incentives and business models around this most basic utility were not broken.
If people can build collectively incredibly useful resources like wikipedia and openstreetmap why not an index of the web as a public good that is devoid of the race to the bottom dynamics of SEO and adtech and whatnot.
Why do we need to worry about privacy violation and/or gross commercial bias when trying to access the most important information machinery invented in recent decades, the web?
Imagine you try to find your way in an unknown city and the only maps available are the sketchy freebies handed out at hotels, choke full of commercial ads, spam and fake entries.
We have normalized too much, we are accepting as inevitability suboptimal services. This is not theoretical and without systemic implications. Knowledge worker productivity - which is a large fraction of modern economies - depends on the speed and quality of information retrieval.
At some point people must snap out of the spell and work towards a sane internet that puts the interests of billions of users first.
the capacity of a community for content generation grows faster than the capacity for self moderation, putting a limit on group-size in regards to the level of 'unwanted' content (spam, hate, porn ...).
automated moderation or more tolerance are needed to extend the group further; one of those can be bought with money.
Money is not a dirty word when people work for it (using it to keep count of who contributes valuable time and skill). Unfortunately what is happening - ever so frequently - is various digital cartels finding ways to extract permanent rents and use them to exercise undue and unaccountable control and influence instead of working for the money.
Decades of apathy and bad policy means that is not a trivial problem to crack, but in contrast with all prior technology revolutions, what we have is an entirely social, organizational challenge - disruptive change of behaviors can happen overnight.
We need to think boldly about these new "professions" (open source developers, online platform moderators, creative commons content generators, etc) and how they might become sustainable and purposeful options for people. The dividend we will reap collectively if we succeed is enormous.
> If people can build collectively incredibly useful resources like wikipedia and openstreetmap why not an index of the web as a public good that is devoid of the race to the bottom dynamics of SEO and adtech and whatnot.
The size of a billion scale web search index like ours, is approaching 3 orders of the magintude the size of the Wikipedia and OSM databases we need to provide Wikipedia infoboxes and Map search.
Added to which it's very far from straightforward to provide search across billions of results in around 200ms.
> Imagine you try to find your way in an unknown city and the only maps available are the sketchy freebies handed out at hotels, choke full of commercial ads, spam and fake entries
That is the opposite of what you would expect if incentives and business models around this most basic utility were not broken.
If people can build collectively incredibly useful resources like wikipedia and openstreetmap why not an index of the web as a public good that is devoid of the race to the bottom dynamics of SEO and adtech and whatnot.
Why do we need to worry about privacy violation and/or gross commercial bias when trying to access the most important information machinery invented in recent decades, the web?
Imagine you try to find your way in an unknown city and the only maps available are the sketchy freebies handed out at hotels, choke full of commercial ads, spam and fake entries.
We have normalized too much, we are accepting as inevitability suboptimal services. This is not theoretical and without systemic implications. Knowledge worker productivity - which is a large fraction of modern economies - depends on the speed and quality of information retrieval.
At some point people must snap out of the spell and work towards a sane internet that puts the interests of billions of users first.