The Desperate Need For A Distributed, Peer-to-Peer, Open-Source Search Engine

This year, 2023, is the year in which a desperate need has arisen among those of us who actually try to do useful work via the Internet.  The need I am talking about is the need for a truly open-source, distributed, peer-to-peer search engine that is not owned by any corporate entity.  Google search has turned to absolute garbage.  This is because Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has completely changed the purpose of the Google search engine from helping people find useful information.  The main purpose of Google Search has now become to earn advertising revenue by selling advertising.  I know that some who read these words will say "Well, DuckDuckGo is better!"  But such people overlook the fact that DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Yahoo!, and AOL are all owned by Microsoft.  Therefore they rely on the Bing search engine, an engine whose primary mission has also become to earn advertising revenue.  This means that both Google and Microsoft search have become increasingly useless.

These things make me think of a book I recently found called Obliquity, by John Kay.  In his book, Kay describes a number of companies which used to earn large profits for their shareholders by focusing on providing excellent products and services.  However, when those corporations abandoned their mission of providing excellent products and switched to the mission of maximizing shareholder value, they began to crash and burn.  Two examples of this phenomenon are the British chemical company ICI, and the Boeing Company.  Boeing is especially interesting in that this company used to dominate commercial aviation from the 1960's until the early years of the 21st century.  This was because of Boeing's singular focus on aviation science and the craft required to make the best airplanes possible.  However, when Boeing switched to maximizing shareholder value as its primary goal, its executives made a series of unwise technical decisions which resulted in a number of disasters, especially around the 737 MAX aircraft.  These missteps allowed the European company Airbus to gain a global market lead over Boeing.

A similar process seems to be at work in regard to search engines.  For Google, the process started with providing a best-in-class search engine which outperformed all other search engines during the early days of the Internet.  This was because Google was created by people who were genuinely passionate about computing.  But when Google was taken over by grownups in business suits, the passion became the maximization of shareholder value even if this took place at the expense of what used to be Google's primary mission, which had been to help people find things on the Internet.  (Microsoft, on the other hand, had always been run by greedy grown-ups in business suits.)  Thus we the users are now stuck with garbage.  The thinking at Google and Microsoft may well be that we, the users of their products, have no other options, so they can get away with continuing to give us garbage.  But alternatives to garbage do exist, and when they are discovered, they can take hold in a surprisingly short time.  Then companies which seek to maximize profits by offering garbage may find their profits suddenly collapsing.  Just ask the former employees of ICI and some of the recently laid-off employees of Boeing.