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.
£12-ish a year on mailbox.org
I made the switch about 6 months ago and I’m very happy with them
My dream IEP would provide secure search, email, calendar, office suite and cloud services. I would pay just one provider for all services combined. I would gladly double my monthly subscription for such a service, with 2 accounts at 50go each
The fuck do you get for paid email? It’s literally just SMTP/POP — where’s the “value add”? I use my own email client so the bullshit ads from Google aren’t an issue, but am I missing out on some email 2.0 magic??
I use Purelymail for Email, just because it was the cheapest and easiest solution to use my own domain without having to host anything myself. I don’t think any other Email service will beat their 10$ per year price.
For search engine, I have tried Kagi but just didn’t see the point. My DDG searches are perfectly fine and I still find everything I need with relative ease. Although I’ve been actually needing the search engine much less recently as I’ve embraced just reading the official documentation for things I program with haha
Free proton for email, paid 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.
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.
Yes. I pay for Proton for mail and Kagi for search.
As long as it’s fairly priced with proper privacy, definitely.
kagi.com is a paid search engine like you describe.
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.
I pay for email. Proton Unlimited atm which includes email, cloud, vpn, password and email aliases. They offer more but that’s all I use. Their Linux support is crap so I may move to other services.
For search, I using Startpage. Seems to give me the results I want. Once in a while I change to Brave, Qwant, or DDG.
Fastmail is so insanely good it’s crazy how bad Gmail got
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.
What do you mean “if”? At this point anything works better than google. Specially those that cost money.
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.
