I understand and sympathize with this lament, but I think Ben Thompson nails it in his recent article "Privacy Is Dead"[1]:<p><i>There are other services that can’t even realistically choose between advertising and member-supported. Facebook is a great example: the utility of Facebook is directly correlated with how many people you know who are also using Facebook, and the only way to maximize that number is to make the service free, supported by advertising. Google is in a similar boat: the efficacy of search is in many ways tied to how many people are using search. Queries and clicks are the raw grist for Google improving its algorithm, and the more the better, which means making queries free.</i><p>I'd like to emphasize that latter point, "queries and clicks are the raw grist for Google." Approaches like PageRank and tf-idf[2] are only part of the story. A really fascinating and vital point is that the search user activity itself is an amazingly valuable source of relevance data. E.g. one can build a matrix over (search term, number of clicks for URL) as a search index. This supplements the other algorithmic relevance factors, is driven directly by human feedback.<p>Google employees have mentioned that they've worked on other aspects of relevance analysis based on user actions: it's possible to suss out situations such as: you clicked on a link, but clicked right back to the search results because that link sucked. Eventually you found a good result and it "stuck".<p>So user activity itself is very powerful source of search relevance and having more users just makes it work better. In fact, it's a bit startling to realize you can, in theory, build a search index without <i>any source document data</i> based solely on which links were clicked the most. In practice, we need to seed relevance with the purely algorithmic factors then improve it with the feedback data.<p>Given that, an incumbent search engine with a large user base has a big advantage over competitors: they own the base of user activity data. Google's advantage is not just the technology expertise that they've amassed over the years, but also the raw fact of its search market share leadership that any would-be competitor must overcome.<p>[1] <a href="http://stratechery.com/2014/privacy-dead/" rel="nofollow">http://stratechery.com/2014/privacy-dead/</a>
[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf</a>