Why would they do this? Google's customers are the advertisers, not the end-users. And no one is going to pay for a search engine, it's been tried and has failed.
Always curious about things like this. I certainly would pay for this; it sounds like many other people here as well would. I'm curious if the constraint is that there aren't enough people to actually pay for the investment required for the service, or if there aren't enough people willing to pay to meet the standard VC notions of success. We seem to have a problem with building and supplying services for niche (read: "not expressable as an integer percent of the world's population") customer bases, and I'm never sure if that's a business problem or a cultural problem.
Nobody is going to pay for /just/ a search engine. But they might pay for, say, a /better/ search engine, plus additional features around gmail/gcal/gdrive.
Think of it more as subscribing "to google" and less as subscribing to "google search".
Regardless, the point isn't to "fix" google. It's to highlight a possible path for a new market entrant.
... If an existing player wanted to make a move here, I would say that both Mozilla and Apple are well positioned to add "personalized search" to a subscription service. Same with Microsoft. DDG could also make moves here if they expanded beyond search.
A company with an objectively superior search engine could make even more money with ads so now you’re back to the beginning
An “objectively superior” search engine, from an end user’s perspective, might have to make engineering choices that come at the expense of ad revenue.
But we’re all just talking hypothesis, it’d be cool to see someone launch a startup to get some answers.
It's not open source as far I know and there's only the free trial way to try it.