Source: I've been doing digital marketing/SEO since ~2008 and happily abused easy signals to manipulate rankings for fun and profit for many of those early years.

If we’re pretending this is taking place in another reality what are we hoping to learn from this hypothetical?

> with the express intent to return Google Search to 2010 levels of efficacy and to remove all LLM functions from both its frontend and backend

It would be simpler for the US govt to build such a search engine like that today as google was a lot simpler back then, however it wouldn’t work because the internet has changed as much as Google has.

If the goal is to make the internet search better via intervention it might be simpler to force Google to share relevant patents for free with competitors and new market entrants, and doesn’t require a benevolent government to work either.

Even without that kagi exists and it’s fine

And the next one? And the one after that? How about the one after that?

Otherwise you need to break Google up just to separate search from ads, lot of complexity in that and adversity from big tech.

I think, if we're going to be heavy-hitting about this, the more proper thing to do is to force Google to split their search off as a separate, independent company that has additional business requirements imposed on it to rectify the issues.

But I really think that, if search is the worry, the market will eventually achieve its own kind of balance and you'll find an acceptable alternative to Google's that restores much of what has been lost. For me, that's already the case.

I much prefer Google today than in 2010. I very rarely look at web pages (full of all kinds of bad design, unnecessary text, and ads) now. Google gives me the information directly.

Edit:

"annihilated by ~15 years of cynical corporate marauding and product torture" - I'm with ya man, wrote my rant on this topic the other day https://chriswebb09.github.io/our-ai-reality

If "the state" is indeed a tool used by "the people" to accomplish the will of the the people, then sure, I think nationalization of large, nation-wide or world-wide corporations is probably fine and good. But this requires a totally different world order. It's hard to imagine something called the USA as participating in such an arrangement.

I don't think a "less corrupt" USA government is one that should be taking over the likes of Google, however. Even the more polite version of the USA is one that dominates the world through military force and local communities through a surveillance apparatus (see Flock now, but basically every town in America gives half of its general budget to the police). The data that Google holds needs to be regulated by the government, not handed over to the government.

There's no particular reason why the USA government (or some other country) couldn't spin up its own new search engine service that provided something akin to 2010 Google search, with no advertising to boot. There's no political will to do something like that, but that seems much more imaginable than nationalizing Google/Alphabet, and I think perhaps still entertains your hypothetical.

Much of this is just about building out the index. (Yes yes, "just", I know folks at Google will yell at me that I have no idea what's required at scale, and they're absolutely right. I also know that Google REALLY do not like people building any kind of competition, no matter how tiny.) Some have done the work, Yep has a huge index they've built from their Ahrefs work. Obviously Brave is already there, it probably already powers the web search for your favorite LLM.

For everyday use, you often don't need the whole index though. You just need your corner of the web indexed, the tiny section that you use frequently.

Rather than nationalizing it, and being subject to whatever government decides... for the internet that you personally want, your own personal index is the most true answer. Only then will it find the information you want, with the rankings that you want.

That sounds great, regardless of the Google stuff.

That way anybody could build their own "old search", or innovate off the global dataset.

There is absolutely no way I can ever go back to vanilla web search vs Gemini.

Also, it's funny you brought up politics, as if the current political regime is the last corrupt one we'll ever have. If you have the incentives for corruption in place, you will have more corruption. If you give Google to the government, it will use Google to support that corruption. The Trump era is a great time to be asking, "would I want the government to have even more control?", because there will be another Trump eventually.

Seriously though, this is a bizarre proposition. Google hasn't been a "Search Company" for decades. Google is not there to search the web for you. Internet users need to grow up. From this Iron Age of the Internet where we bashed the keyboard with "google search" to find whatever we wanted there. Ask any reference librarian, how to intelligently build a toolbox of bookmarks and resources, and use those resources to look up stuff that you want instead.

I do not use Google Search, or Bing Search or any other, except in the dumbest of circumstances. I already know where such searches would've sent me, so I go to those sites and I query them instead. It's not rocket science.

But that ship has sailed and the Days of Search Engines is in a notable sunset phase. It is simply impractical to build and maintain a search engine when LLMs are taking over. The LLM is your search engine now. Learn it, love it, bash it, Bronze Ager.