Anil DashThere has absolutely not been a better opportunity in this century to build a successful new search engine for the internet. The dominant players are running full speed to make their offerings worse, and that’s after *years* of complaints that Google’s results are decaying.
Graydon@anildash Why do you think it's a solvable problem?
Once a search engine catches on, the reward for gaming it becomes functionally infinite.
(There's the AWS line about any online service is really just a distributed denial of service attack you asked for, too. The minimum resources required are not small.)
What we're seeing is an unstable system that pushes any successful search engine -- meaning it works well enough that people use it -- from "cooperate" to "defect" because it is used.