> Most of the problems appear, superficially at least, to be consequences of advertising
Some trivia: Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page wrote about this in their 1998 paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine". [1]
8 Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives
Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of
the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For
example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of
Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and
risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because
of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on
the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone
ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this
type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising
funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the
consumers
They just did not know how destructive this conflict of interests would later be.
P.S. I'm a happy user of https://kagi.com! Definitely worth a Netflix sub per month, at least for programmers. :)
[1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf