Ranking search results on popularity is flawed. It may improve search engine performance and the effectiveness of online advertising but it penalises users who can think critically and independently. There is an underserved market that has been left behind by Google and its "competitors".

PageRank seemed to borrow from the concept of citation count. The idea that "importance" could be measured by the number of times a webpage, like a paper published in a peer-reviewed academic journal, was referenced by other webpages, like other papers published in peer-reviewed academic journals. The initial name for the project before "Google" was "Backrub", referring to the reliance on "backlinks" to quantify importance.

An index of a commercially-oriented www full of sites supported by online advertising is nothing like Web of Science or some other database collection that allows ranking by citation count. The www has no peer-review and no limits on commercial activity.

Google succeeded in creating something highly profitable and sometimes useful, but the founders never delivered on their original promise. That was a search engine in the academic realm, where the technical details were public, and one that would be free from the influence of advertising.^1 Instead the project was turned into an online advertising business. A 180-degree pivot.

The moral/ethical debate went from the question of being advertising-supported to the question of invading the personal privacy of users, for the benefit of advertising. Whatever ideals the founders held in 1998 were overtaken by the lure of pure financial success. Once oppposed to idea of using cookies for advertising purposes, the founders were persuaded to purchase DoubleClick, ground zero for the explosion of online ads, for $3.1 bilion. Not sure what if any moral/ethical debate remains today. While the company is being sued simultaneously by hundreds of plaintiffs, including the US government, one of the founders is "hiding out" on a small island in the South Pacific. Whatever motivations he had to make an open, academic search engine free from the influence of advertising, they seem to be gone.

In sum, the world still needs a decent web search engine free from the influence of online advertising.

1. https://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Excerpts:

"Up until now most search engine development has gone on at companies with little publication of technical details. This causes search engine technology to remain largely a black art and to be advertising oriented (see Appendix A). With Google, we have a strong goal to push more development and understanding into the academic realm.

Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives

Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.

For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.

[T]here will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm."