lxn's comments

Most of the search engines now days have the advantage of being closed source (you don't know how their algorithm actually work). This makes the fight against unethical SEO practices easier.

With a distributed open search alternative the algorithm is more susceptible to exploits by malicious actors.

Having it manually curated is too much of a task for any organization. If you let user vote on the results... well, that can be exploited as well.

The information available on the internet is to big to make directories effective (like it was 20 years ago).

I still have hope this will get solved one day, but directories and open source distributed search engines are not the solution in my opinion unless there is a way to make them resistant to exploitation.

1) Indexing text vs indexing integer it's very different when it comes to memory/space required by the database.

2) There is already an index on ids assuming they are used as primary keys, why adding another index (on text)?

3) To support changing slugs (titles) you will have to keep all the old slugs as well (to redirect them to their new versions). With ids you don't have to do this - ids have no reason to change.

In the end you might not feel the difference in execution time, but hardware requirements for servers...

I agree that they are annoying, but when the only reason against them is to improve URLs aesthetics (assuming they don't pose a security/information disclosure risk) - the trade of performance, hardware requirements and extra code needed is not worth it IMHO.