Google is not a search engine. It's an advertising service. Their whole business model revolves around a critical mass of eyeballs, which flock to free services. This will never happen for the average user.

If you say you'd pay for a search engine. Oof. Guys we used to just link useful things at the end of our blog posts and on our myspace pages. Then search engines came in and we didn't have to. Then they killed the SEO placement of blogs. Now you can't find anything useful unless you try their AI. The whole business model is convincing us we need them while they make the internet less efficient to scroll through.

Actual Internet funeral

Pretty much https://kagi.com/ but outrageous

Image Transcription:

A white page with black text. On the top left is the Google logo. Underneath is text reading:

"UH OH!

"You've used all 75 of your daily free searches!. You're currently using Google Lite for infinite searches, please consider subscribing to Google Premium."

On the right side is a digital drawing of a bulldog standing like a human with its right forepaw on its hip and its left forepaw holding a pair of binoculars to its eyes. Underneath the dog is text reading:

"Get one month of Google Premium for $14.99 AUD!"

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I'd pay for google if they didn't steal my data.

I might be the odd person out here, but if Google offered a premium sub service that did 0 data collection and I never got served a thing by ad sense, I'd pay for it.

My thought is that with data collection and advertising you become the product that is being sold. I'd rather buy a product than be a product.

EDIT: Not just search, but a sub for all Google products I use.

I'm not sure you you understand how Google makes money...which would tell you why this would never happen.

Don't give them ideas lol

This is literally how their search API works. Except the limit is more like 25 queries a day and the price would be closer to $40/mo for average user's usage.

DON'T GIVE THEM IDEAS!

Fucking do it, I dare you.

I've recently started paying for unlimited searches over on Kagi, and I'm very happy with the results so far. I'd gladly pay if it meant less search cruft and higher result quality, but sadly Google's just been going downhill for quite a while now.