this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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I'm just gonna plug "Kagi" here.
Kagi is a paid search engine. Yeah, sucks that we have to pay for good or decent search results, but... as the economic models of the internet change, we need to change with them. I've personally lost faith in freemium ad-supported websites in general.
It's no surprise that "free" search funded through advertising led to this. The economic incentives were always going to lead us to the pay-to-win enshittification that we see today.
Paid search might look better initially, but a for-profit model will eventually lead to the same results. It might manifest differently, maybe through backroom deals they never talk about, but you'd better believe there will always be more profit to be made through such deals than through subscription fees.
Newspapers were always partially advertisement driven.
But I think everyone would agree with me that Newspapers were better when a substantial base of their $$$ came from their subscriber base.
Nothing is absolute in the world of money. There's always additional sources of money elsewhere. From this perspective, I think we can argue that purely advertisement-driven media is what is most dangerous. Search is an important part of modern digital media, so thinking of the economic realities of funding, and how those economic incentives shape the website and future business is important.
Maybe it fails, but Kagi is trying something new. And that's good enough as an experiment for me. I dunno, maybe I'll revisit the idea in 5 years or so, that's really not much money in the great scheme of things.
At very least, Kagi now has a "Fediverse search", and now that "search-lemmy" seems to have died, I need something like Kagi to more easily search Lemmy.world and other Fediverse locations. (Google ain't so good at this yet).
It most likely will be better initially, if for no other reason than they need to strongly differentiate themselves from Google (and Bing and DDG). I'm just not very optimistic for the long-term outlook in these times of "profit uber alles". I'd love to be wrong.