this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2026
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Trouble is, the web for which the PageRank algorithm was developed has long since died - its highly decentralized, interlinked network of freely available information has almost entirely been replaced by centralized, account-gated silos. Web search engines, in turn, have gotten progressively worse since long before LLMs had become computationally feasible.
much of that, both the centralization opposed to search and the search degradation to force more searches and serve more adds, like the removal of advanced search operators, was deliberate.
Eventually, yes. But many people don't like hearing that the vast majority of them, the users, didn't want to pay for the operating costs of a global search engine when the web got popular. Neither as customers of a company, nor via government spending as a public service, and definitely not through donations.
Hence, given the economic system we live in, the people running search engines had to find some means of funding, which turned out to be selling their users' data and serving them ads. Once they had gone down that path the rest became more or less inevitable.
I don't think users would ever be in a position to cover the many hundreds of billions in revenue that Google found. Yeah, somebody has to pay the running costs, but there's a place where the search engine could exist by just covering the running costs, without making infinite profit on top.
People have tried and went out of business, because users predominantly do not want to pay for something they could (supposedly) get for free, doubly so if the paid version isn't even significantly better. It sounds nice, but it hasn't been true for the last 20 years or so.
The current funding model didn't come out of nowhere, it's the consequence of user behavior. Personally, I would e.g. support a search engine as a public service funded through EU budget, but I'm in a tiny minority with that opinion.