Comment on Stop Internet Searching and Start Asking on Fediverse?
FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day agoJust to save people a rabbithole.
Kagi is pretty cool. But it’s not free. And for most people who don’t have much disposable income it’s not really a justifiable expense to pay for a search engine.
I can sympathize with not having the money to pay for a search engine when others are free. Aside from the great results, I like the idea of paying for a search engine.
“If you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product being sold” is true, and I don’t want to use a search engine that is trying to sell me to advertisers. I want the company’s goals to be aligned with mine as a user. I want them to worry about making me happy as a user, not finding ways to show me ads.
I wish yacy was better. Federated/self hosted search should be awesome.
Would you prefer something limited to searching federated content, or something closer to yacy where it crawls normal websites too?
Steve@communick.news 1 day ago
Of course if one truly can’t afford it, paying for search can seem a luxury.
However I would argue as a counterpoint; If there’s any online service one would consider paying for, it should be search. Search is most literally our “front page of the internet”. It’s our first stop in any quest for information. Even the founders of Google knew early on, that putting adds in search creates a perverse incentive against the best results, favoring instead worse results, so people perform more searches creating more opportunities to show people adds.
$5 a month isn’t much, to know your query will give the results you want, instead of what an advertiser wants.
Jack_Burton@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Absolutely. I never imagined I’d pay for search but Kagi is leaps and bounds better than other search engines. I decided to pay when I realized how much I search every day after getting the free trial. Went through 100 searches in four days. If I search that much, paying for an engine that has no ads, uses useful lenses, and lets me block results from sites like Facebook was a no-brainer.