What made this easy for me is that Google is also no longer Google. Ever since it started basically ignoring my actual search query, I stopped using it. I used to be very good at using Google, too.

DuckDuckGo is quite bad at times, yes. But then, so is Google. If I need to find something I cannot put into search terms, LLMs are helpful. From my trial experience I would say Kagi is also a capable search machine, for some niches.

ChatGPT is the only general-purpose search engine that seems to have any chance of producing a link that is both new to me and useful. Of course, I try not to use it too much, people say it’s bad for the planet or whatever.

I think I get more than $10/month of value out of search engines, and I would rather give money to a company instead of them selling all my data and/or spamming me with a bunch of advertisements. If I am paying for something, then almost by definition the company has a means of making revenue that doesn't require ads.

I hate self-promotion but I wrote about this a bit ago [1], but the TL;DR is that I think people are actually more willing to pay for things if they actually like those things. Something Awful has fallen out of favor now, but for awhile people were happy enough to buy an account because Something Awful was fun to be on [2], and a one-time $10 fee wasn't enough to "exclude" anyone, but it did become a way to support the site in the process. I don't think this model was or is broken, I think SA fell out of fashion because Lowtax stopped caring after a certain point.

Kagi has been growing; I don't know if it's profitable yet, but it has been steadily growing an audience and regardless of your opinion on this specific service, I think this indicates that people will pay for things. At least some of us will.

[1] https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Personal/2026/02-February/Peo...

[2] It actually still is! I bought a new account about a year ago and I had forgotten how funny a lot of the posters actually are. It's a blast.

Kagi, however, has been a different experience for me. I haven’t felt the need to go to Google at all. If I can’t find it with Kagi, I’m confident I won’t find it with Google either. There have also been several times where I was on an outage call with a double dozen people all looking for answers to some issue. Everyone was coming up empty with Google, and I was able to find something that solved the issue pretty quickly with Kagi.

Google is the only search engine allowed to index Reddit [1].

[1] https://www.lifewire.com/google-reddit-deal-8685766

Honestly, it's got to the point where 8 or 9 times out of 10 I switch to Google search because I'm unhappy with the results I'm getting... and really it's at the point where, why am I even still using it?

It's just not very good.

It reminds of something like AltaVista back in the day, or one of those other old skool search engines, with how poor its results are relative to evil old Google.

Agree with this. DDG just seems to have less ‘in’ it.

I’ve been playing with old 8052 microcontrollers recently, and it’s not unusual for DDG to return zero results on slightly esoteric technical searches, when Google will have plenty of relevant results (and it’s not just that Google is less strict about search terms - often I’m searching specifically for keywords).

It also suppresses open protocols. Protocols stagnated as the Internet centralized and commercialized for a reason. Some of these things could just be protocols.

Not saying that would cover everything, but I am sure those two factors would “step in” to replace some aspects of the ad-supported Internet, if the ads went away. How much, I don’t know.

Just run an ad blocker and be done with it. The business model of the website is not my problem; if websites cannot cover their costs without printing ads that I do not want to see, then they will disappear. We will be left with websites that are actually useful, for example businesses operating a website to sell things, or that are funded through donations (e.g. free software).

I worked on open source because I enjoyed the work and because it had control over the final result. Other people did it because of status it gave them in the community. There's plenty of people willing to work on something for "free" (no money) as long as they are compensated in other dimensions such as ownership, status, control or simply enjoyment.

UBI could help here too, since those people still need to eat. Or, society could admit how dependent it is on open source work and pay maintainers and contributors from taxes.

The issue is obviously that most people don't even know what open source is so it's not an interesting political debate topic.

Unfortunately, when needing to do deeper dives on things, Google is still more or less the best for results past the first page in my experience, though it's rare I need to dig that deep these days.

I can't wait for the European index.

I’ve also seen a lot of people using Cryptpad recently, which I think wraps OnlyOffice.

Probably nothing? It’s not like that’s a need that everyone has.

You don't think their own opinion of their own life isn't self-evident proof?

Stopped doing it in 2017 (according to them). https://fox59.com/news/google-will-no-longer-read-your-email...

Gmail has a feature that can break your inbox into a priority section and an everything else section. You have to put in some work to flag and unflag messages based on what you think is important. It's not perfect but with some training it's helpful.

Some people turn it on and expect it to read their minds about everything or think they can ignore the everything else section.

You can just turn it back off. You don't have to leave Gmail.

> And speaking of spam, I have a bunch of proton mail accounts and outlook accounts and iCloud mail accounts and Gmail’s spam filter is easily the best.

Agree. This person's reduced spam experience was due to the new e-mail address and being disciplined about not signing up for a million things on it, not because Proton is better.

I'm personally not so attached to this idea of Google being evil so I don't really get this at all

I'm assuming you mean exclusive disjunction here, but in reality it's something closer to a conjunction, if not occasionally an inclusive disjunction. So many subscription services also have ads and if they don't, they eventually do.

The problem isn't that people want things for free; hell, we all pay for access to the internet already. The problem is a shit-ton of monied interests want to squeeze every possible dollar from people always. So we're slammed with ads and our behavior is manipulated and tracked and monetized and sold.

This was not how things were on the internet or the web in mid 90s. It was not the ethos then, but it became the ethos when monied interests took over.

The old "If you aren't paying for a product, you're the product." adage doesn't apply anymore when even if you're paying, you're _still_ being productized.

The real problem is increasing concentration of _everything_ into ever-fewer (viable) players.

Doctorow's book "Enshittification" goes into way more examples of this phenomenon (though I'm far less optimistic than he is about the ability to reverse this trend).

20-something years ago, when I paid for my internet connection, I also got an email address (or 5…) and some personal web space (5MB maybe?) and access to their NTP servers as part of that. No ads.

Of course if I left the ISP I would lose access to it, as I stopped paying for it. I’ve long since left the ISP, and they’ve dropped all these value adds.

Presumably because people wanted cheaper plans and jumped to other providers which did internet access and nothing else.

There are people willing to pay a reasonable amount for fair services. I pay for various Google and Apple services, including for email. Those that don’t, have ads based plans.

I see the same phenomenon on other smaller forums, too, though. DuckDuckGo always feels like it has a smaller database than Google, which isn't really a surprise.

But only once did Google actually give me what I was looking for. Every other time the Google results were the same SEO garbage I was getting with DDG.

Maybe I should try switching to Google for a full month to see if my search quality generally improves.

That will cover the physical infrastructure of your Internet provider. But there are a lot of websites and software on the internet that require either ads or payment to survive. Free usually means "surviving with somebody else's money aka investors"

The "low-cost airline" style of business.

You'd want such a platform to be relatively open to allow anyone to participate, but you'd also have to be pretty aggressive at policing as bad actors would be all over the place trying to artificially drain an account. Maybe it's something that could be built into the browser? You could get a "X would like to charge you for a visit" which you could approve or deny and you could configure to always approve.

Transaction fees would be a beast.

Those who are wealthier pay more into the tax system, allow those who are less well off to gain access to things they normally wouldn't. This is a good thing.

Likewise, those who are wealthier are buying more products that are advertised, allowing those who are less well off to gain access to the internet for closer-to-free. This is also a good thing.

We can put limits on how advertising is done, give control over your data, etc etc. But the fundamentals stay the same.

So no: paying your way towards internet products won't save the average person money.

At the end of the day, Apple exists to make money and keep shareholders happy.

If the business stops growing organically, do you really think they're going to benevolently use the massive control they have over their own platform?

"Apple" isn't privacy-focused. Their marketing strategy is currently privacy-focused and their economics currently permit them to be.

I much prefer to use scholar.google.com or npmjs.com for research. The URL is already in my history/bookmarks and the scoped query is more useful than the generic websearch.

But I think the AI overviews in DDG and even Google have helped a lot.

AI has helped search tremendously. I only search for things that should have exact answers.

And what if there was a company (let's call it Google) that was extracting huge sums of money out of this social security system? Would this make you think that perhaps something was wrong about it? And that the system could be more efficient without this company?

[0] https://www.404media.co/email/4650b997-7cc3-4578-834c-7e663e...

See this previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46708678

It's the same vein as criminals using cash vs Bitcoin; both can hide crime, but one is way easier to scale up.

Kagi had a post discussing this which made the front page of HN about a month ago [1]:

> Google does not offer a public search API. The only available path is an ad-syndication bundle with no changes to result presentation - the model Startpage uses. Ad syndication is a non-starter for Kagi’s ad-free subscription model.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46708678

> Because direct licensing isn’t available to us on compatible terms, we - like many others - use third-party API providers for SERP-style results (SERP meaning search engine results page). These providers serve major enterprises (according to their websites) including Nvidia, Adobe, Samsung, Stanford, DeepMind, Uber, and the United Nations.

> This is not our preferred solution. We plan to exit it as soon as direct, contractual access becomes available. There is no legitimate, paid path to comprehensive Google or Bing results for a company like Kagi. Our position is clear: open the search index, make it available on FRAND terms, and enable rapid innovation in the marketplace.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-google.html