Yes, and that's great.
They don't want surveillance Capitalism.
Without surveillance capitalism, prices for services would go up or would cease to be free.
The ad-driven business model is a legitimate one.
I assume that you use a free service from Google/Facebook/Microsoft? So you must not care about surveillance capitalism either. At least not care enough.
This happens exactly because there is no competition and hence antitrust is needed. I don't want to be using services from Google/Facebook/Microsoft but there's no competition and then I end up using their services even when trying to avoid it as most as possible...
If the prices for services would go up without surveillance capitalism so be it, that's the real price, I want to choose to pay for it, not be coerced into giving them my data for their "free" services. I don't have that option right now, nor anyone else, why are you against freedom of choice?
It was a search engine developed by an ex Google exec. It had no ads, no tracking. It required a subscription to use. Most people who used it said the search results were great.
It shut down because no one wanted to pay for it.
People do care. They just don't have much, if any, choice.
Neeva, founded by a former Google exec, built a search engine that had no ads and no tracking. No surveillance capital. They just shut down because no one wanted to pay for it - hence the idea that 99% don't care about surveillance capital enough.
2. It's literally just a claim. I have no way of verifying the claim. Them asking me to pay for it makes it more sus.
3. I use searx already. Which I can confirm isn’t “spying” on me because it has nothing to tie me to my IRL identity.
4. It was a Bing reseller. I don’t care for Bing resellers.
You say that like there aren’t numerous other competitors in the space: DuckDuckGo, Kagi, Brave, searx, qwant, startpage, etc, etc.
These services provide both paid and ad based models.
Neeva failed because of its own issues. I am in their target market and I had never even heard of them until they shut down.
Starting any business is extremely challenging, one failing doesn’t imply there was no market.
Just…no. This is giving me vibes of the FBI “secure” phones. Fuck that.
That's cool. And do you think many people will also happily pay 250€ every year? Do you think enough people care so make this a profitable business? And if so, why isn't there one yet? If there is, why aren't you a happy paying customer?
>I'd be happy to also pay that amount to browse without being spied on.
Same question.
>These products not existing is just a failure of the market
Is it? Or is the market simply responding to (lack of) demand?
It seems to me that many people on HN forget that we're just part of a very small bubble, a niche. We're a tiny target segment, we're not very good at paying for things, and frankly we make pretty shitty customers for various of other reasons. Instead of admitting that we're not that valuable to businesses, we project our own desires onto others, and when we don't get what we want because it's not profitable, we expect the government to step in and force someone else pay for it.