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.