this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2024
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This would be great. Running a search engine is very expensive though.
The Internet Archive is probably the closest thing we've got to something like this. It's a non-profit but AFAIK they don't get any government funding. They've got the scrapers and could probably work on a search engine project, but I doubt they could afford it in their current state. They're spending a lot of money at the moment due to companies filing lawsuits about Internet Archive archiving their content (and a bunch of content is gone from the archive forever as a result
The federal government spends about $1.3B a year on advertising and another $37.5B on data collection, with Google being a major recipient of both budgets. Nationalization would save a small fortune.
And for the economic tailwinds that efficient Internet research provides, I'm willing to bet we'd see significant economic benefits that eclipse the base cost, not unlike with Amtrak or the USPS.
Them and Wikipedia, definitely. Both make for excellent models of non-profit free-at-point-of-use information services.