There is a truism that “nothing is for free”, but when it comes to the Big US Corpse destruction of the fantastic web that we used to have and its replacement with bland politicised pro-US carp where everything is controlled by the US for the US … we’ve paid a very heavy price for very little benefit.
The same is true of advertisement funded channels. They are always having to bow and scrape to the advertisers and the user gets sidelined.
Why can’t I pay for a search service that is run for me as a customer? Not as some scam like Twitter where they allow the very rich to opt out, but as a service with minimal prices intended to cover running costs and future investments by the charges.
Much like browsers, people have been trained over many decades not to pay for search engines. When your competitors are giving away their service for free, it’s a hard market to break into. Building a search engine is really hard already, so even Kagi, which does offer only a paid service, is ultimately leveraging other search engines like Google and Mojeek to deliver it.
Brave Search has the option to pay not to see ads, and has their own index. That’s about as close as you’ll get today.
Kagi is making a run at it, but it’s been tried before and failed. Anyone remember Neeva? (CEO is now the CEO of Snowflake though for the other data geeks out there, so it worked out for him!)
