[compsciphd]

This actually could be a business model (in a very dirty way) for something that I prototyped years ago, that really didn't have a business model behind it.

My thought was to make a personal search engine. i.e. it wasn't about indexing the internet (though perhaps there was value to that in combination), but to index what you've seen / your social network shares with you (easier when the APIs to said social networks were actually usable, that's sort of gone the way of the dodo).

The problem is, while searching what you've seen / social network shares with you is "nice", how often are you actually going to use it? My thought was to make a browser extension that would make that passive, i.e. constantly show you what's related to the page you are looking at, from said index (using lucene's 'more like this' type search). My implementation was clean (not dirty like I said above), because it was all client side, nothing stored on any servers.

A dirty business model using a similar business model to this, would be to store everything online, and charge people to search their data, but they would be giving up all their privacy to this index then (hence the dirty part).

I also thought of targeted ads in the extension, but that would seemingly be a related privacy issue.