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I agree. What the search space needs is a different business model. I have no idea what it could be. I'm quite sure a subscription model would fail. Micropaymen

I agree. What the search space needs is a different business model. I have no idea what it could be. I'm quite sure a subscription model would fail. Micropayments have not taken off. How can we fund meaningful search divorced from an ad business?

baggachipz 4y ago
I've been using Kagi[1] in private beta; they plan to launch a subscription model very soon. I hope it works out. [1] https://kagi.com/faq https://kagi.com/faq
- Beltiras 4y ago
  While I might be a target audience for them and willing to pay a nominal fee monthly for good search I'm quite sure there isn't a market for it.
  - verve_rat 4y ago
    I wouldn't be so sure. I bet there is a viable business in selling a quality search engine. Maybe not dominate the market, take over the world, but not every thing has to be that.
    - prox 4y ago
      Every month I see my user experience decline with Google, in so much a paid search solution would be a blessing. Imagine a search engine that truly is private, containerized search and does not need to sell you anything. It only wants to serve you true relevance and accuracy. That engine also skips over all monetized sites that serve more than 5-10% ads. Prefers cookieless sites. That search engine would be bliss.
      - darinf 4y ago
        Working on much of this at Neeva. We have a free tier, no ads cluttering the results. Just focused on the user experience. We also offer a premium tier for those who are keen to support us.
        prox 4y ago
        Unfortunately the app is not available in my region it says. Will there be an in browser solution?
    - bkobren 4y ago
      We have been working on exactly that at Neeva and the response has been very positive in terms of growth and adoption. Neeva offers a freemium model (free basic and premium for $5/Month which includes paid versions of VPN and a password manager), you can connect third party apps like dropbox and email putting all your personal docs in one search along with websearch, both versions are ad-free and private, it's available to anyone in U.S. and we are building our own independent stack to make the search experience unique and better.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    Just 1% of Google's market might be enough to sustain a non-bloated, VC-free company and make a good product. The Bloomberg Terminal is extremely expensive and yet companies pay for it because it makes their traders' jobs so much more efficient. I don't see why companies wouldn't do the same for a search engine that filters out all the bullshit so their employees don't have to waste their time wading through it.
    - FredPret 4y ago
      1% of people who use Google is a hell of a lot. Also, Bloomberg doesn’t just search, it also provides data
      - Nextgrid 4y ago
        Categorized search results are also data. Bloomberg is no different to Google in this regard, it doesn't generate the data, it just fetches and aggregates market data from various sources which anyone could technically do with enough effort and yet people pay for it.
        FredPret 4y ago
        They add their own interpretations and calculations of footnotes to financial statements. It’s a step beyond categorizing and aggregating.
    - smt88 4y ago
      > Just 1% of Google's market Google has 4.3B users, so 1% of that is 43M. With a $5 subscription, Kagi would have $215M in monthly revenue, enough to pay for 14,000 developer salaries. A more reasonable target might be 500k users at, let's say, $10/mo.
    - freediver 4y ago
      You are right. And the actual number is lot smaller. We just need 0.001% of Google users to be sustainable with the current team size. (or about 50,000 users out of 4.3B Google users). And if you find 50k users, you will find 100k. First 5k is tricky! (Kagi founder here)
  - greybox 4y ago
    You really think you're unique?
    - Beltiras 4y ago
      No, but one among few.
  - kwertyoowiyop 4y ago
    At this point I’d pay for it. Every search I do these days is a fight with Google to find pearls buried in the overwhelming muck. I’d sincerely like to see how search curation would change if the intent was to keep me as a paying customer, not to show me more ads.
  - mark_l_watson 4y ago
    I am using their beta search service. It does seem nice enough. I am not sure yet how it compares with DDG, but I am probably going to sign up as a paying customer.
    - darinf 4y ago
      DDG is just repackaged Bing with their own ads inserted.
  - bkobren 4y ago
    Give Neeva a try (disclosure I work with them). We offer a freemium model (free basic and premium version for $5/month that includes paid versions of VPN and password manager), it's ad-free and private, it's available to anyone in U.S. and we are building our own independent stack to make the search experience unique and better.
    - fils 4y ago
      Just a user of Neeva here but a happy one. Also very excited to hear about the work toward an independent stack! Enjoy the spaces and immersive search UIs for various types of searches. Neeva make search fun again. ;)
- DashAnimal 4y ago
  I just searched "how to fix a flat tire" on both Google and Kagi and got pretty similar results. Different in display but no .edu links in sight.
  - thepasswordis 4y ago
    Why would a .edu help you learn to fix a tire? That seems like a YouTube question, not something a school would teach, and if they did, not something that would go online.
    - jefftk 4y ago
      The article we're discussing is about limiting your search results to ".edu" domains to remove bloat, and gives an example of an https://www2.latech.edu/~bmagee/303win97/Group3/2245.html https://www2.latech.edu/~bmagee/303win97/Group3/2245.html which does have this information on changing a tire.
    - throwmamatrain 4y ago
      I think the idea is that the SNR of .edu TLD is likely higher than all other TLDs. Probably true for now.
      - chongli 4y ago
        Too bad .edu seems to be restricted to US-based schools. There's plenty of great stuff hosted by universities in other countries but none of them are on the .edu TLD.
        dredmorbius 4y ago
        There are other national domain schemes with educational subdomains. 'ac.uk' and 'edu.au' being two of which I'm aware. A listing of top global educational institutions would only have a few thousand entries. It's not without some irony that I note that the early, and much belated, Internet was largely edu domains, along with a handful of tech firms, government agencies, and military entities.
amelius 4y ago
Just ban their old businessmodel, and they will come up with a new one. Or let Musk buy them.
- Beltiras 4y ago
  How do you propose to bring about such a ban?
  - Mountain_Skies 4y ago
    There are many ways laws could be written to would effectively ban the current online advertising business model. One could be to require written permission each and every time a company wants to transfer user data of any kind to anyone else. Google could try keeping all Google site collected data internally but all analytics data collected from non-Google sites would be forbidden without written permission for each and every instance. Every site would have to run their own data analysis and sell their own ads. Advertisers would be unlikely to take Google or anyone else's word, so audits would be necessary but difficult to conduct. It wouldn't completely end online advertising but would turn it back into something closer to the old traditional model where those selling ad space had a handful of semi-generic personality models for their readers/users and advertisers would select one that best matches the profile of their target customer. It destroys the economics of centralized data collection. There are many other laws that could accomplish a similar end but through different means. The biggest barrier would be getting politicians to not care about the demands of huge tech companies that dump endless amounts of money into lobbying and campaign funding.
pbz 4y ago
It doesn't matter what new model you come up with. As long as capitalism is around and pushing for ever increasing profits this kind of behavior will always be on the menu.
- baremetal 4y ago
  do you have a solution or are you just upset about capitalism?
  - mcosta 4y ago
    The solution is a system that doesn't have internet to begin with.
    - baremetal 4y ago
      radical. im inclined to agree.
  - pbz 4y ago
    I'm not upset nor do I have a solution; I'm just pointing out the model/problem.
chii 4y ago
> How can we fund meaningful search divorced from an ad business? The only way you have not listed is gov't funding. And i dont think i would trust a gov't run search engine either. May be a well meaning librarian institution could make it work. > I'm quite sure a subscription model would fail. this hasn't really been tried yet - it could work, who knows?
- Beltiras 4y ago
  An alternative is academic institutions. I'd trust a university-backed government-funded search engine.
  - InCityDreams 4y ago
    University of Moscow?
    - Beltiras 4y ago
      That's a good one! I guess no.
- bkobren 4y ago
  Hi there, you should give Neeva a try. Disclosure, I work for them, but we were the first to introduce a subscription, interest/growth has been really strong so far. Neeva offers a freemium model (free basic and premium for $5/Month which includes paid versions of VPN and a password manager), you can connect third party apps like dropbox and email putting all your personal docs in one search along with websearch, both versions are ad-free and private, it's available to anyone in U.S. and we are building our own independent stack to make the search experience unique and better.
  - InCityDreams 4y ago
    Missing commas? "...offers a freemium model (free basic and premium for $5/Month which includes paid versions of VPN....." Or as it reads?
lolpython 4y ago
AndiSearch[0] is going for a freemium model: > How we make money > We plan to fund Andi through a freemium business model, with free anonymous search for everyone for ever, and paid plans for professionals and businesses, including APIs and using Andi for corporate information, with supplemental revenue from anonymous referral link attribution. We're focused on building the product right now, and will figure out the details once we're further along. > We are committed to staying 100% advertising free. Commercial considerations or partnerships will have zero impact on our search results or recommendations. Our recommendations are always made based on the best results we can find for our customers, and are never subject to commercial influence. > By sharing search revenue with content producers and media companies that join our network, our mission is to provide funding to great content and reduce media's reliance on invasive ad-tech. Contact us at info@andisearch.com to get involved! There are only 2 employees[1] of the company so there is a low amount of revenue they need to be self-sufficient [0]: https://andisearch.com/about/ https://andisearch.com/about/ [1]: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/andi https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/andi
- moffkalast 4y ago
  Unfortunately there's little that stops them from just taking your money and then forwarding your query to Google and their response back to you.
BurningFrog 4y ago
Why not make micropayments take off? Do I have to build the startup myself?
chongli 4y ago
Why stop there? Social media suffers from the same conflict of interest as search. Heck, even mainstream media online has this problem: the public's confidence in journalism has plummeted due to the rise of clickbait, fake news, and sensationalism. What I really want is a decentralized, non-commercial, open source web. As part of this I would like to see search and communications moved to the client, rather than the cloud. This seems like it would take a huge effort to build, however, and even more monumental effort to bring people into the network. So it feels like a pipe dream at this point. I do think there are a lot of other people out there craving for something similar, based on nostalgia for the old days (90's and earlier).
- technothrasher 4y ago
  > based on nostalgia for the old days (90's and earlier). Indeed. The internet in general and the beginnings of the web were a very different place back then. I remember about 1996 or so seeing a URL on a Pepsi can and thinking, "oh crap, it's over."
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  I've been sort of thinking there really ought to be a sort of open source manhattan project to disrupt the search ecosystem and offer real competition to big tech. There's a lot more to search than just search in the traditional sense, and I think multiple cooperating services offering small complimentary functionality slices could probably offer reasonably similar capabilities (save for like image search, maps and translation) with a significantly smaller hardware footprint. My own search engine is fairly janky, but a lot of its problems are understood and could probably if not be fixed, at least mitigated. That's one functionality slice, searching documents. You could have a slice for forums, one for reviews, one for high value sites like stackoverflow and wikipedia, one for facts, one for popular links in social media and news, one for source code, one for mailing lists, and so on. As a whole, I think you might actually be able to put together an actually useful information gateway this way. Would be a lot of work, but I think the amount of work probably exceeds its difficulty.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
Do we really need it to be a business? Does it need to make money? Torrent communities and DHT don't make any money and yet they're pretty good. Would it be possible to build a decentralized solution around finding things on the internet? Something with trustworthiness ratings and user controlled blacklists perhaps?
scroot 4y ago
Why does web search need to have a business model at all? Why can't we just provide the Library of Congress funding to run something like it? Google got its start as a library project, after all, and it's the natural place for such a service.

baggachipz 4y ago

I've been using Kagi[1] in private beta; they plan to launch a subscription model very soon. I hope it works out. [1] https://kagi.com/faq https://kagi.com/faq

Beltiras 4y ago
While I might be a target audience for them and willing to pay a nominal fee monthly for good search I'm quite sure there isn't a market for it.
- verve_rat 4y ago
  I wouldn't be so sure. I bet there is a viable business in selling a quality search engine. Maybe not dominate the market, take over the world, but not every thing has to be that.
  - prox 4y ago
    Every month I see my user experience decline with Google, in so much a paid search solution would be a blessing. Imagine a search engine that truly is private, containerized search and does not need to sell you anything. It only wants to serve you true relevance and accuracy. That engine also skips over all monetized sites that serve more than 5-10% ads. Prefers cookieless sites. That search engine would be bliss.
    - darinf 4y ago
      Working on much of this at Neeva. We have a free tier, no ads cluttering the results. Just focused on the user experience. We also offer a premium tier for those who are keen to support us.
      - prox 4y ago
        Unfortunately the app is not available in my region it says. Will there be an in browser solution?
  - bkobren 4y ago
    We have been working on exactly that at Neeva and the response has been very positive in terms of growth and adoption. Neeva offers a freemium model (free basic and premium for $5/Month which includes paid versions of VPN and a password manager), you can connect third party apps like dropbox and email putting all your personal docs in one search along with websearch, both versions are ad-free and private, it's available to anyone in U.S. and we are building our own independent stack to make the search experience unique and better.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  Just 1% of Google's market might be enough to sustain a non-bloated, VC-free company and make a good product. The Bloomberg Terminal is extremely expensive and yet companies pay for it because it makes their traders' jobs so much more efficient. I don't see why companies wouldn't do the same for a search engine that filters out all the bullshit so their employees don't have to waste their time wading through it.
  - FredPret 4y ago
    1% of people who use Google is a hell of a lot. Also, Bloomberg doesn’t just search, it also provides data
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      Categorized search results are also data. Bloomberg is no different to Google in this regard, it doesn't generate the data, it just fetches and aggregates market data from various sources which anyone could technically do with enough effort and yet people pay for it.
      - FredPret 4y ago
        They add their own interpretations and calculations of footnotes to financial statements. It’s a step beyond categorizing and aggregating.
  - smt88 4y ago
    > Just 1% of Google's market Google has 4.3B users, so 1% of that is 43M. With a $5 subscription, Kagi would have $215M in monthly revenue, enough to pay for 14,000 developer salaries. A more reasonable target might be 500k users at, let's say, $10/mo.
  - freediver 4y ago
    You are right. And the actual number is lot smaller. We just need 0.001% of Google users to be sustainable with the current team size. (or about 50,000 users out of 4.3B Google users). And if you find 50k users, you will find 100k. First 5k is tricky! (Kagi founder here)
- greybox 4y ago
  You really think you're unique?
  - Beltiras 4y ago
    No, but one among few.
- kwertyoowiyop 4y ago
  At this point I’d pay for it. Every search I do these days is a fight with Google to find pearls buried in the overwhelming muck. I’d sincerely like to see how search curation would change if the intent was to keep me as a paying customer, not to show me more ads.
- mark_l_watson 4y ago
  I am using their beta search service. It does seem nice enough. I am not sure yet how it compares with DDG, but I am probably going to sign up as a paying customer.
  - darinf 4y ago
    DDG is just repackaged Bing with their own ads inserted.
- bkobren 4y ago
  Give Neeva a try (disclosure I work with them). We offer a freemium model (free basic and premium version for $5/month that includes paid versions of VPN and password manager), it's ad-free and private, it's available to anyone in U.S. and we are building our own independent stack to make the search experience unique and better.
  - fils 4y ago
    Just a user of Neeva here but a happy one. Also very excited to hear about the work toward an independent stack! Enjoy the spaces and immersive search UIs for various types of searches. Neeva make search fun again. ;)
DashAnimal 4y ago
I just searched "how to fix a flat tire" on both Google and Kagi and got pretty similar results. Different in display but no .edu links in sight.
- thepasswordis 4y ago
  Why would a .edu help you learn to fix a tire? That seems like a YouTube question, not something a school would teach, and if they did, not something that would go online.
  - jefftk 4y ago
    The article we're discussing is about limiting your search results to ".edu" domains to remove bloat, and gives an example of an https://www2.latech.edu/~bmagee/303win97/Group3/2245.html https://www2.latech.edu/~bmagee/303win97/Group3/2245.html which does have this information on changing a tire.
  - throwmamatrain 4y ago
    I think the idea is that the SNR of .edu TLD is likely higher than all other TLDs. Probably true for now.
    - chongli 4y ago
      Too bad .edu seems to be restricted to US-based schools. There's plenty of great stuff hosted by universities in other countries but none of them are on the .edu TLD.
      - dredmorbius 4y ago
        There are other national domain schemes with educational subdomains. 'ac.uk' and 'edu.au' being two of which I'm aware. A listing of top global educational institutions would only have a few thousand entries. It's not without some irony that I note that the early, and much belated, Internet was largely edu domains, along with a handful of tech firms, government agencies, and military entities.

amelius 4y ago

Just ban their old businessmodel, and they will come up with a new one. Or let Musk buy them.

Beltiras 4y ago
How do you propose to bring about such a ban?
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  There are many ways laws could be written to would effectively ban the current online advertising business model. One could be to require written permission each and every time a company wants to transfer user data of any kind to anyone else. Google could try keeping all Google site collected data internally but all analytics data collected from non-Google sites would be forbidden without written permission for each and every instance. Every site would have to run their own data analysis and sell their own ads. Advertisers would be unlikely to take Google or anyone else's word, so audits would be necessary but difficult to conduct. It wouldn't completely end online advertising but would turn it back into something closer to the old traditional model where those selling ad space had a handful of semi-generic personality models for their readers/users and advertisers would select one that best matches the profile of their target customer. It destroys the economics of centralized data collection. There are many other laws that could accomplish a similar end but through different means. The biggest barrier would be getting politicians to not care about the demands of huge tech companies that dump endless amounts of money into lobbying and campaign funding.

pbz 4y ago

It doesn't matter what new model you come up with. As long as capitalism is around and pushing for ever increasing profits this kind of behavior will always be on the menu.

baremetal 4y ago
do you have a solution or are you just upset about capitalism?
- mcosta 4y ago
  The solution is a system that doesn't have internet to begin with.
  - baremetal 4y ago
    radical. im inclined to agree.
- pbz 4y ago
  I'm not upset nor do I have a solution; I'm just pointing out the model/problem.

chii 4y ago

> How can we fund meaningful search divorced from an ad business? The only way you have not listed is gov't funding. And i dont think i would trust a gov't run search engine either. May be a well meaning librarian institution could make it work. > I'm quite sure a subscription model would fail. this hasn't really been tried yet - it could work, who knows?

Beltiras 4y ago
An alternative is academic institutions. I'd trust a university-backed government-funded search engine.
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  University of Moscow?
  - Beltiras 4y ago
    That's a good one! I guess no.
bkobren 4y ago
Hi there, you should give Neeva a try. Disclosure, I work for them, but we were the first to introduce a subscription, interest/growth has been really strong so far. Neeva offers a freemium model (free basic and premium for $5/Month which includes paid versions of VPN and a password manager), you can connect third party apps like dropbox and email putting all your personal docs in one search along with websearch, both versions are ad-free and private, it's available to anyone in U.S. and we are building our own independent stack to make the search experience unique and better.
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  Missing commas? "...offers a freemium model (free basic and premium for $5/Month which includes paid versions of VPN....." Or as it reads?

lolpython 4y ago

AndiSearch[0] is going for a freemium model: > How we make money > We plan to fund Andi through a freemium business model, with free anonymous search for everyone for ever, and paid plans for professionals and businesses, including APIs and using Andi for corporate information, with supplemental revenue from anonymous referral link attribution. We're focused on building the product right now, and will figure out the details once we're further along. > We are committed to staying 100% advertising free. Commercial considerations or partnerships will have zero impact on our search results or recommendations. Our recommendations are always made based on the best results we can find for our customers, and are never subject to commercial influence. > By sharing search revenue with content producers and media companies that join our network, our mission is to provide funding to great content and reduce media's reliance on invasive ad-tech. Contact us at info@andisearch.com to get involved! There are only 2 employees[1] of the company so there is a low amount of revenue they need to be self-sufficient [0]: https://andisearch.com/about/ https://andisearch.com/about/ [1]: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/andi https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/andi

moffkalast 4y ago
Unfortunately there's little that stops them from just taking your money and then forwarding your query to Google and their response back to you.

BurningFrog 4y ago

Why not make micropayments take off? Do I have to build the startup myself?

chongli 4y ago

Why stop there? Social media suffers from the same conflict of interest as search. Heck, even mainstream media online has this problem: the public's confidence in journalism has plummeted due to the rise of clickbait, fake news, and sensationalism. What I really want is a decentralized, non-commercial, open source web. As part of this I would like to see search and communications moved to the client, rather than the cloud. This seems like it would take a huge effort to build, however, and even more monumental effort to bring people into the network. So it feels like a pipe dream at this point. I do think there are a lot of other people out there craving for something similar, based on nostalgia for the old days (90's and earlier).

technothrasher 4y ago
> based on nostalgia for the old days (90's and earlier). Indeed. The internet in general and the beginnings of the web were a very different place back then. I remember about 1996 or so seeing a URL on a Pepsi can and thinking, "oh crap, it's over."
marginalia_nu 4y ago
I've been sort of thinking there really ought to be a sort of open source manhattan project to disrupt the search ecosystem and offer real competition to big tech. There's a lot more to search than just search in the traditional sense, and I think multiple cooperating services offering small complimentary functionality slices could probably offer reasonably similar capabilities (save for like image search, maps and translation) with a significantly smaller hardware footprint. My own search engine is fairly janky, but a lot of its problems are understood and could probably if not be fixed, at least mitigated. That's one functionality slice, searching documents. You could have a slice for forums, one for reviews, one for high value sites like stackoverflow and wikipedia, one for facts, one for popular links in social media and news, one for source code, one for mailing lists, and so on. As a whole, I think you might actually be able to put together an actually useful information gateway this way. Would be a lot of work, but I think the amount of work probably exceeds its difficulty.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago

Do we really need it to be a business? Does it need to make money? Torrent communities and DHT don't make any money and yet they're pretty good. Would it be possible to build a decentralized solution around finding things on the internet? Something with trustworthiness ratings and user controlled blacklists perhaps?

scroot 4y ago

Why does web search need to have a business model at all? Why can't we just provide the Library of Congress funding to run something like it? Google got its start as a library project, after all, and it's the natural place for such a service.