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If you want to pay for search (and some other stuff) you might consider Kagi. Check out discussions on Hackernews, the consensus is quite good for Hackernews Standards. I personally use it since it matches my view about privacy and I like to pay for that since that's seem a logical way to enable me not to be the product. The results are good and you can prioritize sites easily.
Man all this positivity for Kagi feels astroturfed. No offense if you're actually not a paid shill, but everywhere I go it seems too flowery to believe.
I mean they give you 100 searches to try before asking you to pay so the opportunity cost to find out is pretty low.
I've also said nice things about it, and it's just because I'm happy that I can look shit up again. The results are relevant, the blogspam and listicles get stuck in their own sections that I can safely ignore, and I don't get constantly tracked by Google when I search for random shit. It feels like using Google way back in the day before enshittification.
+1 to what others have said ... Plus I think lemmy is still way too small for "paid shills" in any case. It's okay to like a product you've spent money on, presumably that's why you're spending the money 🤷♂️
Edit: Granted, the original commenter does have a very small lemmy comment history (at least as seen from my instance ... maybe larger if you take the time to load their profile on their home instance)
Sorry I lurk mostly
Totally valid, just looks a little sketchy lol
It feels like it but it's really not. We're actual users who genuinely like the product because it's catered to nerds like us.
If you too are a nerd, I can highly recommend just giving it a try. If you look for it, you'll immediately notice many things that Kagi just simply gets so damn right.
Also, i would love to try other payed search as wel. Its just that the Google problem to me seems to comes from the fact that the need to earn money on things I don't want them to. So out of principle, paying for search (as long as I can afford it) seems to me the right thing.
Als kagi is better then DDG, brave and bing on the axis where Google is stil best so basically almost as good. And on the points of OP it is much better than today's Google So all in all my experience is that contrary to ddg I never needed to go back to Google since I started using kagi. That's quite an achievement.
Just try The free version is not enough in the long term but should be fine to evaluate.
What bothers me is that using it in incognito is cumbersome at best and almost impossible sometimes.
In your settings you find a special url that contains your session. If you set that as the search engine, it also works as expected in incognito mode. However, when you log out, the link expires if I'm not mistaken.
Just try it? You’ll get a free trial, use a fake email, no payment details or use info needed as far as I can remember.
I believe also https://kagi.com/fastgpt is free to use.
Well, I just went for the 100 search free trial, liked what I got, and am now a paying customer. I rarely switch back to Google for specific local stuff, but for 99% of my searches, I prefer what I get on Kagi , and even more what they offer me besides that: privacy and no ads.
Believe what you want, but I'd say give it a try and see for yourself.
I've heard enough in the replies -- I will be giving Kagi an honest shot.
Some positivity is certainly genuine.
The volume does seem suspect.
Shoutout to them for not censoring it, at least!
alt-text: screenshot of the paid search engine in question, using their free trial to search for brand name mentions + “astroturfing”, filtered by fediverse sites
PS: I’ve spent like an hour digging into comment histories of people who mention paid search. Best believe though companies are gonna be PROS at seeding comment histories by now.
They have a really small userbase, but it lines up well with the demographics here: Early adopter, tech enthusiasts with a distrust in Google and tired of how bad search is now.
Early adopters are generally very excited about whatever they've picked up. They feel the same way about a search engine the same way I feel about wearing only the same brand of black socks. Super excited to tell everyone about it whenever I get the chance because of how much it changed my life.
Indeed.
I’ve said in a previous discussion I was sympathetic given “I’ve sounded like an ad before.” We evangelize great stuff.
Now in the history of their business has any employee ever even mentioned the brand name without disclosing their affiliation? My money’s on yes.
But guaranteed nerds who love it chime in too.
Not paid by them but I use it. I enjoy it because it lets me filter out bullshit sites and prioritize others. I’m not aware of another engine that does it to the degree of Kagi.
Basically everything I need to look up for work is now always on the top half of the first page just by pinning documentation sites and general reference like Wikipedia.
I was just looking at it. I'll have to try it out. Starting out, I feel it's too expensive but I'll try it and see if my opinion changes.
That was my initial thought as well. You may or may not find it worth it for you. Time will tell I guess.