I've been using Kagi[1] in private beta; they plan to launch a subscription model very soon. I hope it works out.
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.
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.
(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
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.
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.