[avasthe]

Distributed schemes don't take off. Especially this one can lead to severe privacy / security loopholes. And what about people who rarely come online / have limited bandwidth?

A more realistic dream would be finding good algorithms for "webscale" search engines, that all competitors (Bing, DDG) can use such that any one of them can't have excessive advantage over the others.

Secondly, human curated directories may still have future. If I search Google for interesting links or just programming blogs on specific topic, I find lot of SEO optimized low quality content instead of deep technical content so that I often have to search through HN, reddit etc.. and sort by popularity - but searching for particular topic is difficult.