[ReinholdNiebuhr]

I'd be okay with a paid subscription service if I got privacy and some other things as well. There's room for both free and pay. Duckduckgo is ok, but not google. Would be nice to have google, without the bias and without the privacy issues.

[481092]

You'll never have a search engine without bias. A search engine's job is just that, to bias various data, not soak up any and all data on the internet. That's why humans or anyone or anything in this universe is biased, because we can only soak up so much info from so many proverbial directories in a lifetime.

[nine_k]

The web may be biased. But a search engine that reflects that bias is just doing its job correctly.

One inevitable and useful bias a search engine has is the bias against spam. It's aligned with the interests of the user.

There can be (and are) biases that are against the users' interests but are aligned with operator's: promotion of some content, censorship of other content. This bias I would rather see gone.

[kamfc]

For a second, thought you were describing Netflix's algorithm.

[mosselman]

I always hear people complain about DuckDuckGo and it gives me the impression that they haven't actually used it for a while. I only use DuckDuckGo and I find it to be a great search engine.

[treerock]

Except perhaps Google is actually better at search because it knows so much about you.

In that case a Google without the privacy issues is basically the same as duckduckgo.

[fauigerzigerk]

>I'd be okay with a paid subscription service if I got privacy and some other things as well

Payment and privacy are a very problematic combination, especially where end-to-end encryption is essentially impossible.

[benoliver999]

Yeah "I'd be OK with a paid subscription" means "I want my searches tied to one account".

You pretty much get to choose one or the other.

[0xcde4c3db]

Also: how many executives, seeing that corpus of data on people who are demonstrably willing to spend money, would pass up the opportunity to extract more money by finding a way to sell it to marketers?