Google’s mission statement is this:
Google’s mission statement is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
I would argue they could try harder, but they have a fundamental issue – they aren’t very likeable or trustworthy.
Google is the dominant search engine, and it has achieved that primarily due to four fundamentals:
- The Internet is free to navigate
- Use bots to index all of it
- Analyse the content of each website
- Decide which information is more important, by who links to what
All of this is done without permission, just like you and I can visit most websites without permission. An alien race with an Internet connection could create a Google, and we would never know (aside from their strange IP address…)
But what if Google had permission, had agreements, to delve deeper. It hasn’t of course, so lets consider a Google-killer called The All.
No, scary. We will call it TheOmni.xyz (Omni for short)
So which extra data points and sources could be included, by being inclusive, and not a “don’t do evil” loner?
Wikipedia says The deep web, invisible web, or hidden web are parts of the World Wide Web whose contents are not indexed by standard web search-engines.
That means sites that you need to be logged into to find content that otherwise is not visible. Google doesn’t access that, which makes their mission statement seem a bit weak, after 22 years of existence…
Some such sites might embrace the idea of making their information accessible in exchange for being part of bringing down Google…
Now, don’t misunderstand, this is not about making silly memes rise to the top of the search results, BUT some walled info could make a for a better search engine, if done intelligently.
For example, discussions in local community groups on FB, arguments between verified academics in Twitter (if that was a thing…)
New, different data points could be harvested from so many places if permission was granted:
- Amazon “you might also like this”
- Most read stories in a newspaper
- Scholarly articles
- Broker recommendations
- Social media, of course
- The Wayback Machine
- Platforms like WordPress and Shopify could provide visitor data
While they may offer unlimited indexing access to Omni, the results would likely be partial in nature. A smart enough system could provide an intermediary page that has a succinct answer, but you need to join/pay to see the full information.
Here’s a good example. Instead of Google finally starting to try and group the same news stories and indicate which came first, by analysis… Omni can simply get such data from the news services. The indexed version of the page would have data only Omni can see, like where they sourced their story from.
Trusted providers could provide an honest date of publication, instead of Google trying to work it out.
The revenue model might not be too difficult. Omni coves all the general web indexing (same as Google) and gets half the revenue. All the other data providers get a share based on how many data points they provide that lead to search result.
The starting point is not difficult either – news. There has already been a lot of problems with Google “stealing” news and working out compensation. Why doesn’t every legitimate news service (must have some original, actual reporting, as judged by humans) band together and produce a news search engine, and block Google?
They are already quite incestuous anyway, reporting on what their competitors reported… syndicating. Maybe formalise it more.
From there they branch out into academia, which is kinda similar – rivalry but the shared goals.
Then get the Socials to share data on how the news service’s own stories perform (shares, likes).
And it keeps expanding, via trust and mutual benefit, until Google is no more!