Search being a democracy is really just a crude way of creating a better ranking system than just looking at, say, keyword occurrence count. Humans are great at filtering out spammy and useless websites, and the democracy system picks up on that.<p>As a next step, privacy issues aside, what if they &quot;profiled&quot; you by the types of things you search, and tried to guess what <i>you need</i> based on other people who &quot;think like you&quot;?<p>For example, I&#x27;m a programmer, and if I search &quot;python&quot;, I&#x27;m probably searching for something different than a biologist who is researching reptiles. This would be fairly obvious to decide based on the other types of things I typically Google for.<p>I&#x27;m sure Google is probably already researching how to do this, though. It sounds difficult to me though because of the sheer number of models you&#x27;d have to train and store, and then figure out how to run a distributed index on. It might be more feasible to create some small set (e.g. ~1000ish) profiles of &quot;types of people&quot; and then match you into one of those types. This could also mildly alleviate the privacy issue as the profiling could be done offline on the client.