Paying for search
(If you have something to say about search engines, please click on “read more” and read to the end of the post.)
David, a GenXer blogging at Forking Mad+, joins many others in his dissatisfaction with google search. He used DuckDuckGo for a while, but found the results to be rather unfocused. A year ago, he tested Kagi.com, which differs from most (all?) other search engines by charging money for the service. It’s important to say that the difference is that they charge money — google has its own way of exacting payment from the users. After his initial test of Kagi, he decided he wouldn’t do that. But his frustrations with DuckDuckGo eventually brought him back to kagi. He’s now been paying for his searches the past six months, and in this last post he explains why he thinks it’s worth it.
I’m right there with him. We’ve had a family account with Kagi for well over a year, and I have no regrets at all about the decision to pay money for my searches. The results are focused and good, and we’re not being tracked. (As implied by my not linking to the Kagi site, I’m not making any money on this recommendation. I’m just a satisfied customer piling on to David’s post.)
However, my thinking about this has gotten more complicated over the past year. (Is there anything that hasn’t gotten more complicated over the past year?) Even though we live in the US, we’re gradually moving more of our tech accounts — e.g., cloud storage, email, password management — to non-US companies. Kagi is a US company. So I’m wondering about alternatives. I gave up on DuckDuckGo several years ago. Over the last few weeks I’ve tested StartPage, Ecosia, and Quant. I’m distracted by the sponsored content on StartPage. I like the ecological emphasis of Ecosia, but the search results seem less focused. I’m still playing with Quant.
Interested in hearing what others think about this. Any reliable non-US and privacy oriented search engines?
