It would be expenses and profit, the remaining traffic keeps users coming.

Imagine a government creating a search engine as a public service.

... Oh wait, that's actually a great idea and I want to see that happen.

I, personally, am very, _very_ glad my country doesn't oblige me to use a state-sponsored search engine.

Baidu "六四事件"[0] to find out more!

[0] "June Fourth incident", the Chinese name for the Tiananmen square massacre. Other banned search terms include "candle", "never forget", and the numbers 25 and 64.

I wasn't imagining one would be obliged. Merely that as a demonstrated vital good in modern society, it's something a government could, perhaps, guarantee a minimum standard on.

Ad-free tax-funded search would be kind of neat.

You know, even with Google amd Bing, search terms are extremely (even politically) censored depending on where you search from. It's not like Chinese users can search the same thing fine on Google.

Sure, then advocate for your government to build a public search engine.

Why do you need to penalize private institutions if users prefer to use them over a government service?