this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2026
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Search should be a public utility at this point.
But then again I don't know how you'd neutrally maintain a search algorithm.
Regardless, depending on a private company for something so fundamental to societal functions seems bad.
You want the government running search?! That's an absolute horror show; you see the impossibility of neutrality.
Here in Florida, "homosexual teen" would lead to sites about conversion camps. We might just score a Democrat in the governor's mansion today, so that would change. And then change again. Imagine the non-stop public fight over what is and is not appropriate to show in a search. AH! (I'm actually having a giggle thinking about such fighting. "Trannie" would lead to results about transmissions one year, a transexual slur the next, banned altogether the next.)
At least there would be a non-stop public fight over it, instead of just having to swallow whatever the corpos which captured the government want to put in their search result.
I imagine there'd be even more bribery if search was run by a government.
If search was provided by a government run by a functioning country with strong democratic roots - AKA the west excluding the US - political parties messing with search would cause them to lose voters. Bribery only increases that effect in an actually working structure.
the way it worked originally, pagerank. SEO, will never cease sadly; goodhart's law n all, but it's better than what we have now