[turtles3]

Honestly I think Google needs to be broken up. It's not a novel idea but the more I think about it the more I like it.

So, Google becomes two orgs: Google indexing and Google search. Google indexing must offer its services to all search providers equally without preference to Google search. Now we can have competition in results ranking and monetisation, while 'google indexing' must compete on providing the most valuable signals for separating out spam.

It doesn't solve the problem directly (as others have noted, inbound links are no longer as strong a signal as they used to be) but maybe it gives us the building blocks to do so.

Perhaps also competition in the indexing space would mean that one seo strategy no longer works, disincentivising 'seo' over what we actually want, which is quality content.

[ohcmon]

I’m afraid the problem is not indexing, but monetization. Alternative google search will not be profitable (especially if you have to pay a share to google indexing) because no one will buy ads there - even for bing it is a challenge

[turtles3]

The hope though is that by splitting indexing that puts search providers on an equal footing in terms of results quality (at least initially). Advertisers go to Google because users go to Google. But users go to Google because despite recent quality regressions, Google still gives consistently better results.

If search providers could at least match Google quality 'by default' that might help break the stranglehold wherein people like the GP are at the mercy of the whims of a single org

[j16sdiz]

Not a bad idea, but there are lots of details need to be fill in and, you know, devils is in the details.

Google's index is so large that it's physically very hard to transfer out while being updated. Bandwidth cost is non negligible outside google's data centre. In terms of data structure, i can imagine it is arranged in a way that make google search easy.