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The purpose of a search engine is to help people find what they're searching for, full stop. We can't go around transforming every class of tool into some kind of galaxy-brained universal-utility-maximizer. Things, meaning not-people, should just do what they're expected to do. Calculators help child traffickers compute the profits they make from their victims, as they should. Search engines should find what you ask them to find. Or at least, there should be something in existence that we could call a "search engine" which just does that one thing and does it well. I don't expect Google to change or anything, they can do what they want. But it's absolutely not wrong to have something that just accomplishes the task of finding a thing you want to find on the Internet, any more than its wrong to have a thing that just compiles code--any code--to an efficient list of CPU instructions.

A tool that has one primary purpose but also does no evil is an insanely complex, corruptible, expensive, and ineffective tool.




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