Google isn’t what it used to be, but the free alternatives like DuckDuckGo aren’t really that great. Given how vital a good search engine has been to make any use of the internet since the late 90s, I think it’s not unreasonable to offer quality search at a reasonable price.
I’m not aware of any paid-for search engines, and I’m not sure what they could charge for without seeming greedy. Perhaps have a free tier that limits you to so many searches per day and a paid tier with unlimited searches and another with API access or something. The key would be to have a good-better-best system that makes everyone feel they’re getting a reasonable product for what they’re paying while keeping the experience serviceable for free riders.
Email is similar. While it’s not too hard to set up a bare SMTP server, a bare SMTP server will get you absolutely nowhere because every reputable email service will flag it as spam. The hard part is making the server pass all the sniff tests that other services use. You also cannot self-host because residential ISPs block port 25, again as a spam prevention mechanism.
I pay for Proton, not because I trust them per se, indeed the more a company trumpets about how secure and anonymous they are the more suspicious I get. But I trust them more than I trust Google and that’s what matters.
As long as it’s fairly priced with proper privacy, definitely.
kagi.com is a paid search engine like you describe.
I use kagi. Better search results than Google. No bullshit. Love it.
I pay for Kagi Search, it’s awesome. It’s got a ton of useful features you’d never see in advertising-based search engines, like the ability to up and down rank sites.
Yes. I pay for Proton for mail and Kagi for search.
Email yes but only with my own domain so I can change providers if the price changes.
I wouldn’t pay for anything I’d prefer to keep anonymous and that includes search.
How is your email not flagged as spam? Last time I ran my own email/domain, I could hardly deliver anything. Been 10-years though and I’ve learned more about best practices. Can it be done now?
I haven’t done it myself but know people who do. If you use a known provider and only the domain is yours I wouldn’t expect it to be blocked as companies also use their own domain for their email.
Running your own SMTP is still going to be tough. But you can use a mail provider that lets you use your own domain, then you can use their SMTP which should not get flagged as easily.
Kagi and Tuta. OP is drunk.
Yep. I switched to Kagi a bit over a year ago, which is paid search. And I pay for my email through Migadu; I thought about hosting it myself but honestly it seemed like more potential hassle than I wanted to deal with.
For email, yes. For search, not until the subscription engines like Kagi go open source (maybe Kagi are and I just missed it but I can’t see a link to a repo on their website).
I have no objections to paying for a service but I am long past just trusting software. As for kagi in particular, $10 (plus tax) per month for unlimited search is a ridiculous price.
For search engine: I’m self hosting SearXNG so I’m already indirectly paying via domain registry/VPS? So yes. Technically this can be done for free though (local docker, random RasPi laying around, …)
For email: paid (mailbox.org), worth it. Selfhosting email was too much of a headache at least for me
Free proton for email, paid Kagi for search.
Not doing it for search engines currently, but I am absolutely doing it for a VPN ( Proton ) for the bonus of having better drive and email attached.
I will agree with you on trusting Proton more than google and how suspicious Proton can seem.
Fastmail is so insanely good it’s crazy how bad Gmail got
If I had the money, then sure. I am currently barely keeping my apartment and pantry stocked tho, so I would not take this option unless it was dirt cheap
What do you mean “if”? At this point anything works better than google. Specially those that cost money.
Can you have a good search engine anymore? You can get rid of ads but now the fact SEO marketing killed internet searches.
I hadn’t thought of SEO as a contributing factor to the decline of the search experience, but it absolutely makes sense. To some degree I think SEO is actually GEO (Google’s Engine Optimization) but if some other platform, even a paid one that isn’t incentivized to weigh sponsored content higher, became dominant SEO would just pivot to minmaxing for that platform instead.
Incidentally, there’s a search engine called wiby.org that only indexes sites that don’t use Javascript, which in practice makes it a great web 1.0 search engine.
I was in the webmaster role for a website from the early start of the internet - SEO started off as simple ways to help improve index placement by giving different methods to the web creators to aid in better categorization of content. It quickly became an arms race of how to best game the system, and the system kept changing as well because the old SEO basics like keyword and content arrangement wasn’t enough. There was one search engine I participated in (I can’t recall now which one) that did the pay for clicks, and you’d literally have to pump money in the online app to try and stay above your keyword competitors, all in real time. It got stupid. And I got frustrated with it, as I felt the original goal to find the best website for a particular search had been long lost and now it was all about mechanisms to profit from everyone trying to make that first page hit. The “best” sites that couldn’t play this game were lost.
Google became the dominant player by buying up other databases and engines, but even with this gaming they used to be able to produce results if you knew how to phrase searches beyond just a few words. It’s almost like the whole AI prompting, what you put in makes a difference. But they eventually changed things and started getting worse results, lots of duplication, and then added AI which ruined anything they still had of quality.
I miss Hotbot. That was my go-to long ago, and it was so good. It became part of Google eventually.
