May we never forget that back in the early days, before Google decided to not not be evil, its founders were very well aware of the perils of what later came to be the funding model behind their own search engine.
The classic citation for this is Brin and Page’s 1998 paper “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” wherein they write that:
…we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious.
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Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.
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In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines.
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But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.
That paper’s authors, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, are of course the founders of Google.
Their written conclusions sound perfectly plausible to me. They’re certainly logical. But, words are just words, and all these years later, does the product they mention as being “crucial” exist? It’s certainly not their own product, Google Search, which today operates along precisely the opposite lines. If that crucial product is one out there, it certainly isn’t very mainstream.
To be clear, there certainly do exist today search engines that aren’t funded by advertisers. But the ones I personally know of are still very much commercial, plus have pretty negligible shares of the search market.
Kagi is one such example. They make their money via users paying them between $5 and $25 per month for a subscription directly, rather than by taking payments for advertising bundled in with the revenue associated with subtle expropriation of each user’s behavioural data. This of course changes the incentives for the creators of the search engine, probably in a very beneficial way for the most part. But it also limits its audience to people who can both afford a subscription and are willing to pay for such a thing.