I don't think it's sustainable to not spy on users or to not serve ads. Keeping user data adds to relevancy and if there is no revenue, there are no relevancy engineers.
That might be true, but web-search is an absolutely vital service for cultural health in the information age, like the telephone system used to be.
Every search engine does sell ads, which seems to be working for them all so far. If that ever stops working, we might see web-search become a public utility funded by tax dollars.
Every search engine does sell ads, which seems to be working for them all so far. If that ever stops working, we might see web-search become a public utility funded by tax dollars.