Ahrefs is working on general purpose search engine to compete with Google. Sounds crazy, right? But lets talk about two huge problems with Google which they will never want to fix:
First one is obviously privacy and it was discussed so much that I will switch to the second one - profit share. Google is making $100B from its search service. Imagine they suddenly implement 90/10 profit share model sending $90B per year to publishers who create content.
That could have been quite a different world. Remember that banner on Wikipedia asking for donation every year? Wikipedia would probably get few billions from its content in profit share model. And could pay people who polish articles a decent salary.
We are talking about hundreds of thousands of people who can make living by organizing knowledge. In our imaginary world websites might remove their paywalls since they get profit share from serving a good content, and it makes sense to make it convenient so people come back.
We've seen how profit share on YouTube made a whole new industry of videomaking for living. So why not Google would not share profit from ads within search results? The answer is the drive for profits to please investors.
By the way, situation is actually even worse than just taking all the profit, Google is showing scraped content on search results page more and more so that you don't even need to visit a website in many cases, which reduces content authors' opportunity to monetize.
We see the Internet as a global effort by humankind to preserve and multiply knowledge, which is as frequently coordinated as chaotic, often driven by economic forces, often by personal impulses.
Nonetheless it is a huge and unprecedented in history multiplicator of knowledge power, as well as entertainment, and infinite education source, merciless Wild West of free speech and ever-reaching communication medium.
Naturally such a vast resource, especially free, attracts countless efforts to tap into it, privatize and control access, each player pulling away their part, tearing holes in the tender fabric of this unique phenomena.
As a countermeasure, there must be a mechanism that will make the ties stronger and self-repairing and shall keep the web strong and transparently interconnected, how it came to be. It is natural to view search engines as an attempt to bring order to the messy bazaar of the Web.
But structure wielded upon chaos should not be rigid and containing as a glass box around a venomous serpent, but rather supporting and spreading as a scaffolding for the vine, allowing it to flourish and grow new exciting fruits for humanity to grok and cherish.
For chaos needs structure to not get torn apart by its own internal forces, and structure needs chaos as a sampling pool of ideas to keep evolution rolling.
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