Why you should bet big on privacy
Here is an unsolicited email I sent last night. I sent it to spinn3r, but any company doing &quot;competitive intelligience&quot;, market research, big data, ect can be subbed in here for their name, because the browser and search engine wars are starting. The email:<p><i>Just read the blog post on optimizing the elasticsearch cluster. It sounds like you have a pretty awesome deployment setup. Now, I know competitive intelligience is &quot;hot&quot; and &quot;trendy&quot;, I mean, for sure it isn&#x27;t mobile-first omni-channel blockchain bitcoin disruptive &quot;trendy&quot;, but it&#x27;s prety close. Now, I jest, but what I am about to say next I am dead serious about: your product is a search engine, just let people use it as a goddamn search engine.<p>Now, let me explain. For like probably over a year now  I have been making the case that between google, elastic and apache there is just a goddamn open source version of google sitting out there. Would a consumer facing pay for search engine be profitable? idk, is your product profitable? I suspect there is a lot of people who would pay a $9.99 a month to upload and control page rank and not have google own them. Lets assume you were able to capture even 0.01% of googles customers e.g. 1 billion people and got them to pay you like $9.99, then you&#x27;d have just shy of $1M MRR, and $11.98M annually. Obviously, you could do some nice caching of resources like stack overflow, reddit, hacker news, and wikipedia and simply store peoples preferences (sort of a heirarchical git like system) and then you would have some pretty swiggity sweet optimizations.<p>You know what might really add value? Having NLP on your own custom tailored information database. I bet people (who search and use the internet daily) would probably see much higher leverage from this than the sentiment analytics you can give them on a competitor. Also, as an aside, you should be mining the competitors customer support channels not only for sentiment but for their inabiliy to service feature requests&#x2F;complaints. Proabably one of the biggest predictors of why wealthfront lost MS to betterment. Regardless though, if you guys are looking for an expansion strategy or a pivot, this is it.<p>tl;dr. Peter Theil was wrong (no, not just about Clinkle) but it is true that:<p>The next larry page &amp; sergei brin will build a search engine.</i>