Brin and Page pretty much say it's inevitable that a commerical search engine will succumb to "evil". The only solution they present is an academic/non-profit run search engine.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html (scroll down to "Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives")

The owners of a commercial search engine say that it's inevitable that a commercial search engine will succumb to evil.

Hmmm.

Not to put too fine a point on it, they once said that - the linked paper from Brin and Page was published in 1998, when they were still students.

Notably, though, just a few months before they launched as a commercial operation.

Reminds me of the Onion article:

https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-na...

Sorry for the offtopic, but Im interested in natural Language constructs like this way of using Hmmm. after a sentence. First I thought it was something from the Portuguese speakers, after more thinking I see maybe it is common of French speakers. Or maybe is common in the U.S. too, I have been there only few times. I found it very funny, and somewhat familiar. :ps: The wonders of having a search engine at anyone's hand.

I think the linguistic term is "interjection". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interjection

So you're not going to apply the "if it's free, you're the product" logic for DDG as well?

Well, the obvious reason is that it may not be possible to get “big” as a search engine, without chipping away at the privacy gaurantees. Even if they get the users, can they sufficiently monetize them without turning into google?

Wouldn't DDG be able to monetize their search engine by simply showing ads relevant to your current search? They don't have to store your search history to do that, and you still get the same privacy.