The world needs a non-profit search engine
<i>&gt;Google makes $40bn...If I can create something that just a tiny fraction of people find useful, then I can create a huge amount of value.</i><p>You conflate two meanings of value: monetary value, and intrinsic value. Search engines are intrinsically but not monetarily valuable to users. Search engines are monetarily, but not intrinsically, valuable to advertisers. You can get into trouble when you conflate these two meaning of &quot;value&quot;.<p>In fact, right here is the pivot on which the internet goes from an idealistic shang-ri-la for geeks, to a commercial hellscape for the unwashed masses. It is surprisingly easy to create intrinsic value with computers! You see it all day every day on HN: some geek had a thought, spends a weekend making it, and then deploys a solution.<p>It is surprisingly hard to extract monetary value from an intrinsically valuable solution. In fact, I believe that <i>creating artificial scarcity</i> is the hardest part of building an internet <i>business</i>, requiring invention on par with the intrinsically valuable part - and yet its the very thing that idealists rail against.<p>(And making something artificially scarce does seem morally repugnant. And yet I don&#x27;t see any other way to pay developers. Full stop. Open source software + consulting fees is a good way to go, but that can&#x27;t apply to hosted search for the public. Well I guess it could, you could teach businesses how to game your own engine!)