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Comment by tkot | Hacker News Reader

If a search engine (be it Ecosia, Qwant, DDG or Google) is used by someone who is running uBlock Origin, does it benefit the company running the engine or does the cost of queries with no chance of displaying an add to the user outweigh the benefit from the meager amount of data collected (IP address? Interest in given keywords? Some more data for tuning the search results?)?

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Search engines should be run as utilities. Unfortunately we are now in the stage where utilities (and other must haves such as education) are run as private enterprises.

of food sector. I guess food is more important for survival than education.

Food production doesn't have the same dynamics as search does. There is little value in thousands of small search farmers each indexing their own acre of the Internet space. That's why it should be run as a utility, it's not about importance.

Few utilities have the exact dynamics of search. Like railroad, water, etc

How soon are effects visible? Complete lack of food - days, chronic malnutrition - months or years. Lack of education - decades. Many people are not smart enough to think that far ahead.

Lack of education is also generally desirable to many people in power. Not just politicians who can more easily lie but also managers and execs. If the tax system is beyond most people's understanding, rich people are not gonna get taxed properly. If people can't do the math on how much value their work produces for a company, they are not gonna understand how big a chunk the people above them in hierarchical structures (like most companies) take out of it.

Unlike food, education (or lack of it) doesn't have universal definition. Because of that it's easy to stretch and manipulate. And it's been stretched and manipulated all the time cause possibility to indoctrinate young people creates immense political power. Like with free speech, non-uniform, not strictly state controlled (which implies private) education is a way to prevent state bureaucracy to concentrate too much power. That's not touching the fact that state hierarchies are well known for their inefficiency. Let's be fair, the reason people usually passionately bring education with politics in neighboring sentences is because it's widely accepted that our beliefs are right, and therefore people who stand against them are dumb, and maybe education can lead them (or at least their children) to our embrace! Funny thing, those "our beliefs" are often incompatible, and even opposite. Which makes me think that humanity doesn't work like that really

You say that, but I don't think you actually want that. Utilities are very good for important, slowly changing type things. They ossify into conservative, safe services. Which is good if we're talking about power generation and transmission or water treatment or whatever. Search is still changing way too rapidly.

We do, on the other hand, need better regulation regarding how individual data can be used, collected, and shared, particularly in the US.

Current search trends, and which results get clicked for which queries, are still intrinsically valuable. Mostly for the search index signals as you mention, and other things like updating recrawl rates, etc.

Even for established players these have value because the index gets stale quickly for certain queries that many people care about a lot. Even though that value isn't fungible, or enough to break even if it were, it's the kind of value that keeps the search engine competitive.

Vivaldi has a (as private as possible, check their blog) whitelist for click attribution. My guess they refer to ads on search engines on their partner search engine.

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