Do you realize how expensive and hard it is to build a search engine from scratch? It's not a coincidence that only state-size corporations have been able to keep a high quality web index going. Cliqz tried and struggled hard, until they decided to shut down. It's not a "market ripe for disruption". It's maybe the market with the highest barrier of entry in tech.
Independence on its own, would not be a competitive advantage. In reality, for the most part, people do not care enough about minor privacy violations. The outrage you see online rarely bleeds into the average user's day-to-day decisions.
I wonder how the next disruptive innovation is going to look in the search engine market?
>I wonder how the next disruptive innovation is going to look in the search engine market?
I think the search engine market will always be very closely linked to content distribution platforms. If the decentralised web continues to degenerate into an oligopoly of walled gardens then there will be no search engine market in the current sense. We will just use the search function provided by each platform.
I believe the question we have to ask is what the next disruptive content distribution platform is going to look like and whether that disruption can be anything more than yet another oligopolist stealing some share from the encumbents before getting bought by one of them (or not).
