If Google makes its money through contextual ads on search results pages now, in an AI-driven world it’ll make its money through sponsored answers (or just contextual ads related to the answers). The way sites will continue to get traffic is through buying ads.
@ben I am spending increasing amounts of time replacing my Google search tools. I've finished swapping out Google Alerts with my own replacement, now I'm working on a custom Stract interface...
@researchbuzz So the question for me is: is there room systemically for a replacement? It feels like the market is completely locked down. So those of us who can will create our own solutions, like you are, but for most people, this is what the internet will be.
@ben Yes. I would really like to see Library of Congress start a search engine. Google doesn't seem to care how bad it's getting in pursuit of revenue. There's got to be a public answer to that, if only to prove that the job can be done better.
Personally, everything I make that I can give away for free I do. I have no money, no job, no influence, and no education. 30 years of thinking about Internet search is all I have to offer.
@ben@researchbuzz I think there's a coherent case for basic Web search with something like PageRank regulated as a utility like water or electricity. (I personally built one of the pre-Google web search engines in 1995-6.)
@timbray@ben Not even a search engine. A PUBLIC INDEX. Just make a public index available with an API and let people build what they want on top of it!
There are so many ways we could be building search tools but for the last quarter-century we've had "rake everything up in a pile and assure the users we've got the chops to deliver the right answer." IT'S NOT WORKING ANYMORE and we need a mechanism to allow other people exercise creativity in this space, the Web search space.
I have to chuckle. I was laughed off multiple venues a decade and a half ago for suggesting not only public indexes, but an even more achievable public search vocabulary and ontology. Instead, we got a few years of hype about Shirky’s folksonomies and tag clouds, failing precisely as badly as every librarian said they would. :)
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