Would you pay for search?

Arstechnica has a front page article about Kagi, a paid search engine. The argument is somewhat compelling to me at least. It's thus: (paraphrased) "you are the customer, so search is tailored to you. With Google, the advertiser is the customer, so search is tailored to their wants."

There are a number of features I find alluring as well. You can turn off AI, demote sites in your search ranking, counter search engine optimizers, and generally get the list of links we all miss from 15 years ago.

And despite all that, I'm not sure I would pay for a search engine. I am 30 years conditioned to expect it as a free service.

Aug 06 · 4 months ago · 🤔 1

15 Comments ↓

I used it for ~a year, but they kept adding more and more AI features that I stopped wanting to pay for it and went back to DDG

I too use DDG. Don't see a reason to stop using them. I tried out SearXNG (a federated scrapper of Big Search) but half the time you get porn as the top hits that it's not great.

I’ve used Kagi for the last 18 months. Worth the subscription price IMO - though I kept hitting limits on LLM use on Ultimate so downgraded to Professional.

@darkghost What value do you get out of this service?

For mobile I start up a security browser that doesn't track stuff and have all my tracking and history turned off. I bookmark stuff whenever I want history.

So would there be much benefit if I just ignore the ads on other search services?

@jecxjo I have a similar workflow. But the AI stuff is obnoxious. Even DDG has some AI junk and the preference for switching it off is stored in a cookie, which means it is gone when I wipe the browser and start fresh.

I think the hope to get anything out of this is mainly philosophical. Even DDG is ad supported, meaning advertisers will still call the shots. Enshittification could creep in. And having Bing as the back end database means it has a single point of failure out of DDG's control.

To be clear, I don't pay for it. I am contemplating it.

That is my view as well. I search with intent so I automatically skip over the ads and the promoted results just as a default. Click search and then scroll down an inch or two before looking.

The ad part goes away when you just not keep sessions. At that point I honestly don't even care if Google is my search engine. I'm behind a VPN and I clear my session with a non-Chrome browser so I'm smallest target for advertising.

NGL, I like the idea of purging quora from my search results and Pinterest from my image searches. Maybe I'll try it with a fake email address and see if it is worth it.

slightly unrelated (or well, certainly related to all AI bullshit part), but I've recently read this:

https://rys.io/en/180.html

This really falls into "nailed it" category, so worth your coffee time to read it. (I also like that the author shares .md version)

A few comments on this article. Yes, publicly traded companies value shareholders pretty much above all else. They're required to. This more than anything else is what causes the lousy ethics in public companies and is the principle driver of enshittification. I do honestly believe most founders want to build something cool and useful, but that doesn't drive insane growth or justify some of the ludicrous valuations stock prices demand. (Of course part of the reason stock prices are insane to begin with is wealth inequality but that is a bigger can of worms.) Hype can drive growth (or at least investment) and the author is spot on. Products are being released not for customers, but for stock holders.

This is far from a new phenomenon, but I can see it reaching absurd and ugly depths.

Part of the problem is capitalism need for constant growth. Founders probably just want to build their thing (and get rich some of the time) but they take dirty money and that money means they need to focus on infinite growth or death, rather than having 10, 100, 1000 users and getting happily rich and maybe even helping people at the same time. Enshification is a requirement of constant growth

I am not sure enshitification is required for constant growth. But it is certainly a product of it these days.

Kagi is fantastic, far far better than any other mainstream search engine these days. Fortunately the "AI" stuff in it gets out of your way and doesn't force itself on you. You can end a query with a question mark to get a short summary of web search results WITH REFERENCES rather than just it making stuff up. Or you don't ask it a question and that's that. Redirections, RegEx based URL rewrites, etc. are incredibly useful. Being able to lower / raise search result rankings and block domains gets you out of a lot of slop websites or simply stuff you don't want to see. Image search has "Exclude AI" settings. It's the best there is.

I just wanted to mention, if you don't like some of the extra features that DDG may introduce/show in their results, just use the lite version, that's my default search engine: https://start.duckduckgo.com/lite/

I actually like AI quite a bit, but I like it when I want it, not when I'm not expecting/asking for it.

In a professional scientific setting, where details matter, I really find the AI useless and annoying. I should know, it mangles my own journal articles.

Well then you also should enjoy DDG Lite, not an AI in sight. :)