Still, its fun to imagine what it might look like if only…
I think the OP is looking for an answer to the problem of Google having a monopoly that gives them the power to make it impossible to be challenged. The cost to replicate their search service is just so astronomical that its basically impossible to replace them. Would the OP be satisfied if we could make cheaper components that all fit together to make a competing but decentralized search service? Breaking down the technical problems is just the first step, the basic concepts for me are:
Crawling -> Indexing -> Storing/host index -> Ranking
All of them are expensive because the internet is massive! If each of these were isolated but still interoperable then we get some interesting possibilities: Basically you could have many smaller specialized companies that can focus on better ranking algorithms for example.
Sigh enough daydreaming already…
I think this is related to the GNU Taler open source project. Appears they are testing to see if the technology is appropriate. New EU project NGI TALER will bring private and secure online payments to the Eurozone
This is my experience too. The sites hosting the articles that I want to read only provide the first parapraph and then a link back to the webpage. News is just headlines. I love that RSS doesn’t allow much formating so you end up with an experience focused on the content itself (and no ads). It feels like a long time ago since I really enjoyed my RSS feeds.
Unfortunately this is mostly true…