Google search worked well enough for me when it was launched 22 years ago. So the patents to that early version should be expired. I'd be happy to use a competitor's service if they would reintroduce a Search API, and PageRank, just give me a programmatic interface that doesn't throw up Captcha after a few searches. I'd pay a reasonable price for the compute time + profit margin.
If Google went back to the original algorithms it would return even worse results. Much of the noise can be attributed to two factors: (1) the explosive growth of the Internet itself, which was much much smaller and had more focused and authoritative content 20 years ago; and (2) aggressive SEO tactics today that would easily fool the early versions of PageRank.
The point about a Search API is that it opens up the problem to a world of 3rd party developers, as opposed to Google putting up competitive defenses by restricting programmatic access. A few years ago I built a web directory that organized and filtered Alexa's top 1MM websites, using PageRank, semantic clustering, and natural language processing. It worked really well, gave me a holistic picture of the internet that was quite different to how Yahoo presented it through their directory. However building it was time-consuming because Google would keep shutting out the ipaddress I was using, so I'd have to keep driving to the next Starbucks up the street to resume my scripts.
Now compare the world of search to the world of mobile phones. Imagine if mobile phones only came with proprietary apps, and there were no app stores. That's where search is right now.
I would strongly disagree. I was at a dinner party in the mid-90s and we had a long-running discussion about how impossible it was to find anything using Altavista and the other search engines. Yahoo's directory was even worse.
The best idea anyone had, which I thought wouldn't scale but didn't have better ideas, was implementing a keyword registry à la AOL.
