There is one way to compete with Google search. Google search is a general search engine. But what if you only wanted medical information? information about cars? information about physics? electronics? history? etc.
Specializing makes for a much smaller scope of the problem, and being specialized means it could deliver more useful results.
For example, imdb.com. I don't ask google about movie stuff, I go to imdb.com because it specializes in movie info.
Some of them charge a lot for access but they certainly exist.
One, the easiest way for them to fight back is to buy you. Two, you're writing off the Innovator's Dilemma that has put them into this mess. Correcting course means giving up a lot of ad revenue and, with it, market cap.
You run this bloated mass as a co-engine to your search. If you stumble upon any of the digested sites or articles you just have the site-eater blob regurgitate a html re-creation locally. They get no traffic, you get whatever they wrote purged of all links and with optional formatting to remove the fluff BS copywrite that many of these sites pad the tiny core of usefulness with.
A solution could be more than one algorithm being used to rank results, i.e. other engines, other rules. They'll likely use many of the signals available to them that Google uses for quality and relevance, but highly unlikely a genuine alternative search would rank them exactly the same- and much more unlikely an SEO could rank well in multiple engines.
The aff links aren't the problem, it's the proliferation of pages that are created solely to rank and get the links clicked on. Sometimes the content is useful, sometimes it's padded nonsense.
What do you mean? Google gained dominance just being a dot com URL. This in a time when competitors were already very well established.
Google's dominance will never be upended by an incremental improvement.
Only people I saw manually typing the url are my office colleagues(mostly engineers of some sort), even management does the same(skipping the FB part obviously) and you can see it when they are sharing their screen and they want to search for something.
To pull people out of google moat, first step is becoming their default search engine.
Eg see how chatgpt grew
1. Create your own index/crawl and true search engine on top of it, rather than delegating that back to bing or Google. In doing so, solve or address all the related problems like SEO/spam, and cover the “long tail” (expensive part)
2. Monetize it somehow to afford all of the personnel/hardware/software costs. Probably with your own version of Google’s ad products.
3. Solve user acquisition. Note that Google’s user acquisition process involves multiB/yr contracts with Apple and huge deals with other vendors who control the “top of funnel” like Mozilla Firefox, and that this is the sole purpose of chrome/android/chromebook/etc who you’ll never be able to make a deal with. You will probably at the very minimum need to implement your own platform (device, OS, browser alone probably won’t cut it).
4. Solve the bootstrap problem of getting enough users for people to care about letting you index their site, without initially being able to index a lot of sites, because you are not important enough.
5. Somehow pull all of this off in plain site of Google (this would take many years to build both technically and in terms of users) without them being able to properly fend you off
6. Somehow pull all of this off in spite of the web/web search seeming like it’s going to die off or fade into irrelevance
OR you can dedicate a decade of your life to something more likely to succeed.