Is there a way to run a profitable search engine without relying on advertising?
Ex: Cloud search - https://aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch/
Ex: Cloud search - https://aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch/
I spend enough time and effort searching that paying 50$/month[0] would make sense if it would get me clearly superior tool.
[0] for reference, I pay 250$/month for place where I live (in Poland).
For my work Kagi is already beating Google. In fact there is is almost no competition, it is almost as if they are in completely different leagues:
In one month I have once gone back to find something in Google that Kagi couldn't find.
For every other query the results have been so good that I haven't even bothered to check.
For comparison, if I use Google I always find myself tweaking my queries or trying with DDG or even marginalia in weird cases, and the same with DDG.
So, apparently Kagi is scraping Google and Bing results via a browser extension. Is this legal ?
I'm still puzzled how they get so extremely much better results compared to using any of thise directly or using DDG which does the same only with Bing.
Also a bit worried because I think there was a time when DDG felt the same before they suddenly gave in and started serving answers for queries I didn't ask just like Google but I'm not really sure.
Kagi is both paying Google for API access and using Google infrastructure (GCP), helping Google make revenue that is not ad-supported.
But basically the results are good and if I don't immediately get exactly what I want one pair of doublequotes around a key phrase sorts the rest.
It's ok so far. Looking at only search (ignoring the "lenses" and listicle-like content) I cannot say it's objectively better than using searx with filtering. At least not dramatically better that I would notice. It is however much better in returning results that actually contain my search terms.
For 600$ a year, it would need to offer full-text regex search and/or exact logical operators with controllable approximation (agrep-style).
I would instantly pay 5/mo$ already though, as long as it stays BS free, and doesn't use past search results to refine further queries. Search bubble is an issue in every single service where this is being used, and I'd like my search engine to be totally exempt from it, and/or have exact control over it.