I agree. What the search space needs is a different business model. I have no idea what it could be. I'm quite sure a subscription model would fail. Micropayments have not taken off. How can we fund meaningful search divorced from an ad business?
Maybe not dominate the market, take over the world, but not every thing has to be that.
Imagine a search engine that truly is private, containerized search and does not need to sell you anything. It only wants to serve you true relevance and accuracy. That engine also skips over all monetized sites that serve more than 5-10% ads. Prefers cookieless sites. That search engine would be bliss.
The Bloomberg Terminal is extremely expensive and yet companies pay for it because it makes their traders' jobs so much more efficient. I don't see why companies wouldn't do the same for a search engine that filters out all the bullshit so their employees don't have to waste their time wading through it.
Google has 4.3B users, so 1% of that is 43M. With a $5 subscription, Kagi would have $215M in monthly revenue, enough to pay for 14,000 developer salaries.
A more reasonable target might be 500k users at, let's say, $10/mo.
(Kagi founder here)
I'm a Kagi private beta tester and love it. Will become a paying customer.
One question: I do remember a page that told me how much I searched and what that would mean once Kagi becomes a paid service. I can't find that info anymore. In light of the mail us Kagi users got today, does that mean that it's going to be a flat rate for starters?
We do not yet know if the flat fee will be viable for the company and we hope to learn that very soon.
If you want to save your search history perhaps you can open a suggestion on https://kagifeedback.org
A listing of top global educational institutions would only have a few thousand entries.
It's not without some irony that I note that the early, and much belated, Internet was largely edu domains, along with a handful of tech firms, government agencies, and military entities.
https://www.goodyear.com/en-US/learn/tire-care-maintenance/h...
On Kagi you have to go until the 10th result to get something from Bridgestone, which explains the same thing while being less aggressive about selling tires:
https://www.bridgestonetire.com/learn/maintenance/how-to-cha...
So the trade-off seems to happen between seeing fewer ads and having better tolerance for imprecise queries.
> How we make money
> We plan to fund Andi through a freemium business model, with free anonymous search for everyone for ever, and paid plans for professionals and businesses, including APIs and using Andi for corporate information, with supplemental revenue from anonymous referral link attribution. We're focused on building the product right now, and will figure out the details once we're further along.
> We are committed to staying 100% advertising free. Commercial considerations or partnerships will have zero impact on our search results or recommendations. Our recommendations are always made based on the best results we can find for our customers, and are never subject to commercial influence.
> By sharing search revenue with content producers and media companies that join our network, our mission is to provide funding to great content and reduce media's reliance on invasive ad-tech. Contact us at info@andisearch.com to get involved!
There are only 2 employees[1] of the company so there is a low amount of revenue they need to be self-sufficient
What I really want is a decentralized, non-commercial, open source web. As part of this I would like to see search and communications moved to the client, rather than the cloud. This seems like it would take a huge effort to build, however, and even more monumental effort to bring people into the network. So it feels like a pipe dream at this point. I do think there are a lot of other people out there craving for something similar, based on nostalgia for the old days (90's and earlier).
Indeed. The internet in general and the beginnings of the web were a very different place back then. I remember about 1996 or so seeing a URL on a Pepsi can and thinking, "oh crap, it's over."
There's a lot more to search than just search in the traditional sense, and I think multiple cooperating services offering small complimentary functionality slices could probably offer reasonably similar capabilities (save for like image search, maps and translation) with a significantly smaller hardware footprint.
My own search engine is fairly janky, but a lot of its problems are understood and could probably if not be fixed, at least mitigated. That's one functionality slice, searching documents. You could have a slice for forums, one for reviews, one for high value sites like stackoverflow and wikipedia, one for facts, one for popular links in social media and news, one for source code, one for mailing lists, and so on.
As a whole, I think you might actually be able to put together an actually useful information gateway this way. Would be a lot of work, but I think the amount of work probably exceeds its difficulty.
The only way you have not listed is gov't funding. And i dont think i would trust a gov't run search engine either. May be a well meaning librarian institution could make it work.
> I'm quite sure a subscription model would fail.
this hasn't really been tried yet - it could work, who knows?
"...offers a freemium model (free basic and premium for $5/Month which includes paid versions of VPN....."
Or as it reads?
https://neeva.com/blog/introducing-neeva-free-basic-and-neev...
Do I have to build the startup myself?
Or let Musk buy them.
Every site would have to run their own data analysis and sell their own ads. Advertisers would be unlikely to take Google or anyone else's word, so audits would be necessary but difficult to conduct. It wouldn't completely end online advertising but would turn it back into something closer to the old traditional model where those selling ad space had a handful of semi-generic personality models for their readers/users and advertisers would select one that best matches the profile of their target customer. It destroys the economics of centralized data collection.
There are many other laws that could accomplish a similar end but through different means. The biggest barrier would be getting politicians to not care about the demands of huge tech companies that dump endless amounts of money into lobbying and campaign funding.