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 and Kagi.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Fastmail is so insanely good it’s crazy how bad Gmail got
Kagi and Tuta. OP is drunk.
Free proton for email, paid Kagi for search.
What do you mean “if”? At this point anything works better than google. Specially those that cost money.
I selfhost mail and pay for search, though I use the API of the paid service in my searxng.
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.
No. There’s no guarantee they won’t get greedy and start selling my data anyway. They’d have to have a really good pitch and some way to back it up that would get me to pay. I yet know what it is, but I haven’t seen it yet.
I pay for proton to get both email and VPN. Search really doesn’t matter that much to me anymore. I’ve learned to just live with the annoying aspects of duck duck go, and I use it infrequently enough that i don’t think I’d ever be willing to pay for it.
