The recent uproar regarding administration subpoena sent to search engines brings up a pretty good business model for someone who’s trying to make it in the search field, like Dogpile or Icerocket – don’t collect any user data.
Yes, it will be extremely hard to sell the idea to advertisers, who are very interested in any metrics you can show them, but that will probably be a competitive point that will sell well – the search engine that explicitly doesn’t log any data, doesn’t keep track of your searches, doesn’t invite you to register and doesn’t even keep your IP address, unless you’ve generated a server error, in which case it’s kept for engineers to look at. If Big.com can make a selling point to the users with one specific feature that no other search engine offers, there might be a space for yet another player in the field.
