The one thing Google has that so far I have not seen seriously challenged is search.
Sure there are other search engines but none really compare in my experience when it gets down to it.
If you hobble your citizens from performing the best possible searches you are putting your society at a long term disadvantage in my opinion. Search really is that important in this day and age.
The answer isn't regulation. The answer is to build a better search engine.
Some people are finding Google's increased fuzziness very frustrating to use.
The lack of ability to specify what should be searched for hinders some searches.
So, there are some spaces for search:
1) better site specific searching. Searching Wikipedia for misspellings (in order to fix them) is frustrating. Searching Amazon is bafflingly awful - I honestly do not understand how Amazon search can stay so so terrible.
2) boolean style operators and stemming choices.
3) I dislike being kept in an English language bubble.
And how do you beat google on search when google is the one with a tracker on almost every important website out there? The search engine which gets the most traffic and can analyze and optimize it? Not to mention the cost to crawl the web 24/7/365 which is the same no matter how many people use your search engine.
That becomes tricky when you acknowledge that the primary reason Google search is fantastic is because they have zero respect for your privacy. You absolutely have a search profile formed with your browsing history which has a massive impact on the results you see when searching whatever query.
Hardly. Many people use Google search without being logged in at all. Chrome pioneered the Incognito mode. You can disable web search history (and I have). There's plenty of respect for your privacy there, you just have to indicate your preference.
Anyway. Personalisation improves search results somewhat. It does not improve them as much as, say, a good spelling corrector.
The one thing Google has that so far I have not seen seriously challenged is search. Sure there are other search engines but none really compare in my experience when it gets down to it.
If you hobble your citizens from performing the best possible searches you are putting your society at a long term disadvantage in my opinion. Search really is that important in this day and age.
The answer isn't regulation. The answer is to build a better search engine.