GOOG Founders Originally Believed Search Should Be Non-Profit - Why Not Do It Now?
By Tom Foremski - November 23, 2009
All the recent debate about the Google index and newspapers, and Google's interest (and problems) in indexing out-of-print books, would all be a much different discussion if the Google index were run as a non-profit.
And it is rather ironic to note that Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, strongly believed that search engines should not be commercial enterprises.
Take a look at page 39 "Inside Larry and Sergey's Brain" by Richard Brandt (referral link).
Brian Lent, now CEO at Medio Systems, also ran into this obstacle when he met with the Google duo.
When he was at Stanford University, Sergey Brin wrote a paper: "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine."
Wow. What if Google were a shared resource, a non-profit, with everyone having equal access to its index?! That would solve a lot of problems that Google is currently facing and that would be avoided if search was a shared resource -- instead of the Internet's dominant index being controlled and exploited by one company.
Could this be a possible future outcome? Could a non-profit search engine "out Google Google?"
If site owners blocked all commercial search with a robots.txt file but allowed a non-profit search engine, that would build a vendor-neutral index very quickly.
A non-profit search engine could support itself by licensing the index to various companies -- even Google, so that they can then apply their algorithms to rank the results according to their specialty.
After all, the value isn't in the index it's in how you present results from the index.
Maybe Google could gain everything if it were to spin-off its index into a non-profit? It would fulfill its founders' original ideals and Google could still be Google.
This would also block any moves by Microsoft to "buy" parts of an index and prevent access by Google or other search engines. Microsoft would have to compete on its ability to analyze the index.
Also, if the index were a commonly-owned resource, every site owner would be able to grant permission to different groups, to access its part of the index.
That's what's missing with the current system. You can either allow a search engine to index your site or not. You have little control over who can access your part of the Google or Bing index.
If the index were held in common, newspaper publishers and others, would have more options, and we could avoid search engine wars, and problems with incomplete indexes.
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Comments (5)
Wow, this could definitely put a different spin on things. A kind of Goog-pedia...
Posted: November 23, 2009 12:40 PM
CT Moore: Yes, and Google could still be Google because the value is in the analysis and not the index. We could have one complete index to work with.
Posted: November 23, 2009 1:10 PM
I always wondered why non-profits, government or local organization do not advertise on Google. Or at least I am not aware of it, because somehow I am not bombarded by any ads that would entourage me to donate blood or inform about community events?
Does Google allow non-profits to use their vast outreach resources for free, just like many local newspapers and radio &TV stations do?
Google and many others evangelists of free Internet, claim that the cost of digital content distribution is zero or close to zero. Then, what is the problem to pass that "zero" to a non-profit. No cost, no headache; the non-profits could write the ads themselves, using Google "free" AdSense, right?
Posted: November 24, 2009 10:06 AM
An open-source search index - that's a really interesting idea.
I don't see a dominant player like Google going for it - their infrastructure is as much a competitive advantage at this point as their algorithm, but I could see some of the second and third tier engines pooling resources to build a Google-competitive co-op index.
Posted: November 24, 2009 10:25 AM
Marshall: It seems there would be lots to gain by outsourcing the web crawling and sharing a common data set. Surely all the value is in the analysis rather than in cacheing a web page...
Posted: November 24, 2009 12:15 PM