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Comment by nugget | Hacker News Reader

I'm just curious: would you pay Google $5/month for a paid search plan that had no ads and didn't store or monetize any of your search query data? Assume you trust them to abide by the terms and not exploit any loopholes.

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For the same search quality they have now, and in a world where Kagi exists for $10, no.

I read a lot of wikipedia. Probably ~10 articles per day. Some people watch Netflix, I read wikipedia. If I search for <famous person name> or <historical event> with no additional context, I want the wikipedia article 99% of the time. Sometimes google is fine and it's the top link, but sometimes it's not even on the first page. This regression is pretty frustrating for my (admittedly niche) use-case.

If Kagi didn't exist and my choice was only between 0$ ad-tier google and $5 no-ads google, I would pay the $5. I pay for YouTube premium to get rid of ads there.

Why not use Firefox's search engine keyword to just make it use Wikipedia directly, or duckduckgo with !w ?

I understand your pain completely. I actually wrote a custom extension for myself where instead of using Google search, it'll automatically redirect and use the Wikipedia search.

I understand this use case and my solution is to just use alfred to run a ddg lucky search on wikipedia. If the top result isn't right I have chrome set up(using an alfred keyboard shortcut) to jump straight to a general search of the website using the query term or if all else fails just open alfred again and select another keyword/search engine.

Not sure how I could optimize it further. It takes less than 2-3 seconds to go straight from needing to find an article on wikipedia to having the article pop up and there is no need to break any kind of mental flow I'm in. Same goes for any other website; adding a new website just requires adding a new keyword in alfred and specifying the domain to my custom workflow. Pretty simple.

Not for the current state of Google. Their results have been dropping in quality for over a decade now (I wrote a blog post about this back then, so it’s been on my mind ever since). They’ve slowly lost the war against SEO and the search features they’ve built are more about keeping you on Google than helping you improve the quality of results.

For me, yes, but now I prefer Kagi, so Google would need to compete on price.

I wouldn’t. Ultimately search is a business that is built on trust, and Google has failed it.

For Google from 5 years ago.

Their current product is worse than few years ago.

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