I feel like there are probably some ad based search engines which are privacy and service oriented, but in general even for those there remains a misalignment problem. Hence if I don’t want to be a product now or in the future, what good search engines are there that I can pay for?
I do some dev and linux stuff and I still found it a bit hard to justify the cost. Like it’s not a bad deal, however i did find myself going through days not really using it properly and just doing simple searches like “product x documentation” or just “site:” searches that i can do with simply DDG or Ecosia (Google). I think it’s cuz a lot of the internet is converging into larger sites rather than being scattered all over and i do find myself relying a lot more on LLM’s. If you actually test out their search results you will get something like 97% there if you do a Google search and a Bing search to follow up or just use searx.
What has helped me completely stop using them is finding sites with valuable information for my use case and creating a manual “lens” something similar to what Kagi offers. It’s really simple and works better than theirs. I have this pasted into my obsidian note for linux (example):
Everytime i search for anything arch linux related so i paste this in and enter the search phrase at the start.
I use t3.chat for my LLM needs (you get way more for the price that you pay, including premium models) so I don’t need their LLM’s. I havent found LLM web search to work well for my use case so don’t need that.
I use DDG as my daily driver and then switch to Ecosia (google wrapper) if i cant find stuff. DDG is a nice search engine overall, fills in that “gap” left by Kagi.
I use zen browser and have created search engine keywords like @ecosia, @ddg, @wolfram so i can CTRL + T and “@ecosia search term” easily.
Overall, I feel like they’re not offering anything groundbreaking but their whole package is nice, i see the appeal especially if you browse on mobile. Whether you find them useful or not will depend on your use case. For those 10$ + tax I personally don’t. The Russia support is disgusting though.