- I switched to Kagi little over a year ago and couldn’t recommend it enough. The search results are actually what I’m searching for, there is AI for the occasions I want it (and only then), and it comes with nice extras like search personalization and a great translation app. Tried to live without it when my first year of subscription ran out, but I didn’t last long…
by asciimoo
11 subcomments
- Ohi, I'm the author of the open source Searx metasearch engine.
I'm working on a self-hosted search service called Hister with the same goal when I started Searx development: reduce dependence on online search engines.
Hister is a full text indexer for websites and local files which automatically saves all the visited pages rendered by your browser. It provides a flexible web (and terminal) search interface & query language to explore saved content with ease or quickly fall back to traditional search engines. This is a fundamentally different approach than what Searx follows and solves most of the weaknesses of metasearch engines. Of course it has its own weaknesses as well, but most of these are not conceptual and can be resolved by improving the software (and datasets)
I've been using it for a few months and as my local index is growing I can avoid relying on external search engines - and even websites listed in results - more and more frequently.
The initial reception is overwhelmingly positive with already more than 30 contributors and hundreds of contributions. Currently it can help with "recall" type searches mainly, but I'm planning to provide pre-indexed thematic datasets and I'm drafting a peer-to-peer index sharing concept. Maybe you can find it useful as well (or at least have some constructive criticism =]).
Links:
- https://hister.org/
- https://github.com/asciimoo/hister
- Background/motivation/beginnings: https://hister.org/posts/how-i-cut-my-google-search-dependen...
- Small read-only demo: https://demo.hister.org/
- I must be the only person in this website who is happy with the AI Overview feature. It messes up sometimes (very rarely) but so do websites. And between ads, cookie popups, newsletter popups, notification permission popups, websites with a high Time to First Byte, and all the useless filler around the content, websites are a nightmare to browse.
I would say that for almost all of my searches the AI Overview feature contains exactly the answer I was looking for, and I don’t even have to leave Google to get it. It’s been a very positive addition.
by tsukikage
4 subcomments
- You are the google search engine pre-2010, well before Google lost their "don't be evil" motto, made the first results page favour sponsors and added AI overview. You respond to a search query with a list of https:// URLs, each accompanied by a representative quote from the destination page that demonstrates the link's relevance to the query, and nothing else. The query is: <insert your query here>
We live in the dystopia we deserve. We have built it with our own hands and it is here to stay.
by BrunoBernardino
5 subcomments
- While there are good alternatives like DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, or Ecosia, there are also ad-free alternatives, where you're not the product, like Kagi [1] or Uruky [2] (I co-founded Uruky, which is also currently and for the foreseeable future "No-AI")!
[1]: https://kagi.com
[2]: https://uruky.com
- The funny thing is that as much as everyone complains about AI overviews and Google losing the plot and so on, about a year and a half ago the “where did you hear about us” field on my website stopped being dominated by “Google” and started being dominated by “ChatGPT”.
Normal people are using AI for search more already, Google is just trying to stop their primary business from completely disappearing.
by WhyNotHugo
3 subcomments
- I switched to DDG a long time ago (maybe close to a decade now?). There's plenty of reasons to dislike Google, but my main reason for switching was better quality results and a faster, simpler UI.
The UI has gotten a bit clunkier over the years, but it's still good, still more focused than Google's.
As I write this, I give Google Search a quick try and notice that the first thing you see is a full-screen cookie banner!? On my laptop, I even have to scroll to reach the Reject/Accept buttons, and keyboard controls don't work at all. I can't believe people still use this crap.
- Kagi is the only search engine that actually provides me with results comparable to plain Google. I do not need to adapt my searches or learn some sort of syntax to avoid pinterest or other offenders. DDG, Bing & Qwant are just not good enough for my use.
by EchoReflection
1 subcomments
- "Something went wrong. Disable your adblocker on TechCrunch
It looks like your adblocker is attempting to interfere with the intended operation of this site. Please add us to your adblocker's allowlist. Click below for instructions."
No thanks, I like ads blocked.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260523024427/https://techcrunc...
- Brave Search has its own index which is fine, 10 blue links and no forced AI, and more importantly support for DDG-like "bangs" (like !gi sending you to Google Images), without DDG's performance issues. I highly recommend it for people who don't want to pay for Kagi.
- For searches where you want more that just the first result and want a depth of results to go through and maybe even check out more than the first page of results I like to use meta-search engines that grab results from multiple sources. Plus it helps route around censorship since you are getting results from a variety of sources. Searxng is the best known one.
I was quite fond of ixquick but it shut down ages ago. These days I like etools.ch especially since it includes results from search engines like marginalia etc that I tend to forget to search directly but like having meshed into my general searches. Plus you can change which engines it uses in settings and it shows which search engine(s) each link came from which is handy.
On a related note I like to check out Serdys list of search engines with their own indexes once if a while. It gets updated here and there and includes a fair amount of search engines I don't tend to see elsewhere.
https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...
- My search on google is still fine. On some searches it doesn't show the AI overview and on some it does - sometimes the AI overview is exactly what i am looking for and sometimes i just scroll down.
- I am surprised people are not talking about Brave and its goggles which allow to block off crappy searches like pinterest all the time + a neat community feature and biggest point, its own search index.
- Google as a search engine peaked in 2005. Since then they've become far more profitable, increased revenue by orders of magnitude, brought search to many more areas, increased headcount massively, improved their share price massively, diversified, serve far more paying customers, become more efficient per query, built data centres, devices and chips with more vertical integration etc. But as a consumer product for simple internet search where I type words and get a list of relevant results it has only gotten slightly worse since then.
This is pure observation/anecdotal. I have no measurements to back this up but I think others will share this view.
- Wondering if anyone considered the idea of saving search stubs and using local LLM as agents with it. Could cut the search engine completely from the loop.
The idea is simple: collect search stubs, short documents with routing information about a topic. When you want to search something your agent finds the right stub and looks up where on the web to go find that information. Your information is always fresh, while a search stub changes slowly, over years, because the entry points tend to be more stable.
If we use a 4B local model and another 4GB for search stubs it could be portable enough to download and install. As you use it you also generate your own search stubs on top of the generic package. A stub could contain links to news feeds, high quality hubs, search engines and of course, actual websites. High quality search stubs can be generated with any frontier LLM piggy backing on its agentic search capabilities.
I think the idea of managing a collection of search stubs as a replacement for centralized search engines is important because it would wean us of one of the last centralized points of the internet. Google plays many ranking games on top of users and publishers, serving their own interests first. I want out of that arrangement.
local LLM + local stub index + proxy == anonymity
- I've been using Brave search since it was first announced. Initially it had to rely a lot on their "fallback mixing" (where it ran an anonymous search on Google to get more results), but after a year or so I disabled it and never looked back.
by postalcoder
1 subcomments
- When is Cloudflare stepping into the game? I know many here are wary of CF's increased role in the modern internet but if they can throw a wrench into google's monopoly, I'm all for it.
They intercept a non-trivial portion of the web's traffic and presumably are as equipped as any other company is to build a good index. They're also the only the only company that has an interesting alternative incentive structure for creators.
by 59percentmore
3 subcomments
- The number of "Kagi" comments here is amusing (suspicious), considering how few people actually use Kagi.
- Surprised not to see a mention of https://tenbluelinks.org/ here.
Google still maintains a web search mode that's free of AI overviews/chat exhortations (as well as ads, if you use an ad blocker). https://www.google.com/search?q=foo&udm=14 is the format of the search URL, and tenbluelinks has instructions on how to use it as your default engine on various platforms.
That said, I've stopped using this as a founder. While I personally like the web search results more (if I wanted synthesis of results, I'd use dedicated agentic-loop-capable tools that are a hotkey away), it's far more important to understand (and empathize with) our users' experiences, good and bad, when they use Google in its full AI extravagance in practice.
- Everyone's tired of hearing about Kagi, and the good news is that they have a free trial now so you can just see for yourself instead of reading comments after comments about it: https://kagi.com/signup?plan_id=trial.
- Brave Search is the best alternative because of their independent index, the AI results are still fairly good as well.
And their browser rocks because of the built-in ad-blocking including for YouTube, and the ability to filter out all YT Shorts on the mobile app.
- I usually switch between DuckDuckGo and Startpage. Both are good.
- I really really really really want to love Kagi, but every time I try it (and I just spent a month trying it, ending a week or so ago), I end up back at Google, finding that my search results are better.
I think the reason is my searches are almost entirely long-tail searches that Kagi's index just isn't good enough for. I am never searching for something like "best mattress" or anything else that is heavily SEO'd - it's always something very specific - so the result page in Google looks pretty much exactly like the Kagi page, only it nearly always has the result I'm looking for where Kagi's doesn't.
- I have been running a search engine for online courses for the last 15 years: https://www.classcentral.com/
The current catalog covers 100+ providers, 1000+ universities, and 250,000+ courses.
Originally a weekend side project that I first shared with the world here on HN itself on Nov 29, 2011 [1]. Currently bootstrapped and profitable.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3288775#3289393
by someguyornotidk
1 subcomments
- Google hasn't been useful to me as a general search engine for a good while.
I've been using Ddg and Brave for general search and Yandex for deep-ocean expeditions (of the jack sparrow variety) and topics that US tech giants censor. I am looking for good Chinese search engine so that I can search things that Yandex censors or when Yandex's bot detection goes crazy (I get blocked with infinite captcha about 25% of the time).
The only thing Google remains good at is local search. If I want to buy something locally, nothing else comes close.
- AltaVista was excellent. On a different timeline we'd be searching on AltaVista running on Alpha chips.
- I imagine google is going the perplexity route, which is honestly fine by me since i do most of my searches with perplexity now. The search harness around it is good enough that i trust it to cite its sources and not go into opinion beyond necessity. If google could make it properly reliable with a good harness then i think its solid. I think this backlash against it wouldnt amount to much and people will just get on the new google
by alexandre_m
1 subcomments
- I pretty much only use Google for news searches these days. Even then, it’s mostly just to get a surface-level view before cross-referencing with other engines for anything important.
There’s so much content getting buried now.
If you’re looking for anything remotely niche or legally gray, like sports streams or ebooks, you’re often better off using Yandex or you’ll never find it.
The old Google search engine that used to properly index and surface the open web has been gone for a long time.
by ohyoutravel
6 subcomments
- Kagi. Just use Kagi. It is by far far far the best. Best money I spend, aside from Fastmail.
https://kagi.com/
- Not sure how Brave is. I'm using its API on OpenClaw, and so far my experience with OpenClaw has been satisfactory — though search is only one part of the overall quality.
I'd guess due to compute constraints, AI overview will struggle to reach truly great quality. That said, for now I find adding this section at the top still useful to me. The broader decline in Google's search quality is the bigger drag on me.
by righthand
1 subcomments
- Gee at least 15 years too late for this article? How many articles did I read from tech media over the years drilling into people that you could never take down Google because everyone says "Google it" instead of "do a web search"? It's too embedded and consumer choice is stupid because Google it lol!*
Google hasn't been "Google" for quite some time.
* I use Kagi and DuckDuckGo before that.
by photochemsyn
1 subcomments
- Yandex is excellent if you want something that behaves more like a old PageRank version of google for news and historical information that isn’t filtered to amplify corporate media outlets. DuckDuckGo is also pretty good for that task, though it is interesting to compare and contrast DDG and Yandex output, they’re typically quite different, but equally useful.
The last use case I had for google was Google Scholar, but it now appears to block anyone who blocks google tracking. But this is where ChatGPT does an excellent job of generating lists of technical papers and reviews and it interprets natural language queries with no problems. The kind of complex logical search queries google used to support (what, 15 years ago?) can be written without strict logical language (! & | ()) and all that. Pubmed isn’t bad for cross-checking and simple searches. And if you put sci-hub into the yandex.com/search box and click on yandex ai it tends to tell you where the current active sci-hub sites are, which is handy.
- Startpage has been great for me. Though I haven't trusted it as much since it was bought by an advertisement company (ironically named Privacy One Group).
It incorporates results from both Google and Bing: https://support.startpage.com/hc/en-us/articles/452243553384...
- To be fair, it hasn’t really been one since SEO
- Mojeek feels like a 'classic' engine as they're 100% independent with their own crawler, index and algorithms. Results aren't biased by third party indices, search history or advertising interests. Kagi is another good alternative.
Google and others are racing to integrate AI but - for me - there are two hidden costs. 1. Access to the web becomes mediated and monetised even more. 2. Energy consumption up to 100x normal searches has an environmental impact.
by GodelNumbering
2 subcomments
- > "Something went wrong. Disable your adblocker on TechCrunch"
I would rather not.
Edit: clarifying that this is not strictly due to ads. I think the article itself is an ad judging by the slug 'six-search-engines-worth-trying-now-that-google....'. Usually such articles include a plug. I am not disabling adblocker to read that plug
- I’ve tried them all and found that Kagi is the only one that my subconscious feels is equal to or better than google.
by thisisauserid
0 subcomment
- I miss the old days of two weeks ago when you guys complained that Google Search was unusable for non-AI reasons.
- > now that Google isn’t really Google anymore
I can't say I've noticed any changes about google search on desktop recently. Yes; there is an AI overview widget at the top of the page; but it's been there for at least a year.
Has anything changed about Google search results for you?
by hmokiguess
0 subcomment
- Any that have a free developer api? Google has shutdown theirs https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview
by khernandezrt
0 subcomment
- Other than the annoying wall of sponsored searched i havent had any issues with Google search results
by mock-possum
2 subcomments
- I appear to be one of the rare few that doesn’t have any trouble - or even see much difference - in the ‘new’ google (non-) search.
Maybe this is a frog in boiling water situation but… it’s just the same search as it’s always been, there’s just now a chunk of Gemini up top, that you take with a grain of salt, same way you’d take the promoted results. If you don’t like it, Adblock it.
When I ask myself honestly, has google search gotten worse over the past 25+ years? My answer is… ehhhhhh… not really?
Other people have always claimed google was ‘getting worse’ and I just don’t see why it should be any more true now than it was then. Isn’t this just the latest round of whinging?
by westurner
1 subcomments
- They used to have:
- Organize the world's information
- Don't be evil
Who was president at this time? Was this while they were denying students the option to code on the computers we bought for them because security?From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil :
> Between 21 April and 4 May 2018, Google removed the motto from the preface, leaving a mention in the final line: "And remember... don't be evil, and if you see something that you think isn't right – speak up!"
That sounds like NY to me.
by pessimizer
0 subcomment
- We need to bring Yahoo! back. Now that we have AI, there's all the reason to go back to directories rather than searches, especially since searches have been faked for years now, and have just become funnels. Search used to be webgrep; now the engines barely care about your query - it's just a prompt to figure out what to sell you.
I remember the first time I copy-pasted something off a major website, in quotes, because I wanted to follow up on it, and got no search results. Not even from the site I copy-pasted from. "Search" has been in name only for a very long time.
Build directories again.
- I switched to Kagi years ago, never looked back.
by phendrenad2
0 subcomment
- I think the anti-AI sentiment is masking a lot of other complaints with Google. For example, right now if you search for any term, and start clicking through the pages of results, you'll see links to random company websites that have nothing to do with the search term (example: search for "most famous astonauts" and on page five you might find the homepage of KFC or Nintendo). Google search is just spectacularly imploding and AI is just the visible component.
by mattmaroon
0 subcomment
- For the first time in their history Google was finding themselves losing market share to ChatGPT. It wasn't a huge amount yet but it was clearly going to become one. That's what this is. The idea that the end user doesn't want this is preposterous. Those of us who make money off the web don't want this but the end user absolutely does.
This is going to happen whether Google does it or not. The toothpaste is out of the tube.
- I just use DeepSeek and I find it works great. You can give pretty loose queries and it will do a good job of finding articles and giving an overview.
- for the non opinionated, duckduckgo with an adblocker has served me just fine for the better part of a decade.
you can simply set the search as you like and save as a search url [1] that can be set in the browser once and forget.
their bangs are useful to search directly in a specific site (e.g. useful workaround for reddit search results not coming anymore). when i tried kagi, i noticed that they have adopted a similar system, which has to be inspired.
my overall search experience has been poor even before the GPTs, but this is just fine for almost everything.
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/settings/params
- Kagi is amazing; I've been using it every day for the last three years and it's been well worth the price. I especially love that they don't shove AI in your face despite having very good AI search available (with locally hosted models!)
I'm afraid of them selling out at this point. If they go, I honestly don't know who will go in their place.
- One thing with the alternative search engines is that they are mostly working fine only for English speaking western world. At least in Polish and for Polish results they do much worse than google.
by kriskrunch
1 subcomments
- I turned off AI overviews in Google search a few days ago. It's often wrong and always distracting.
I changed my default search engine to: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14
Author should mention that you can change your browser's default search engine.
by 0xbadcafebee
0 subcomment
- Haha, I was going to say "why not bing.com?", but I just tried it with search term 'opencode' and got literally only 3 text results and then the "next page" button. The next page had 6 results, the next page had 13 results. I'm not sure how, but having more money seems to result in worse technology
- I don't know what a search engine is anymore, I use Brave search and usually the AI response is more than good, I can dive deeper in AI if needed.
Before, search engines provided links, links provided the info we were looking for. Now AI provides that info without the middle man, links are just a footnote in case you need them.
- I used Kagi for a bit but began to question what I was paying for, there are plenty of other search providers basically doing the same thing, DDG, Ecosia, Brave search etc. I mostly just use DDG now because search as a paid offering that scrapes results from other indexes doesn’t seem like good value
- Surprising that nobody's talking about the non-AI Google - https://tedium.co/2024/05/17/google-web-search-make-default/
by Scene_Cast2
2 subcomments
- I'm surprised that Perplexity isn't mentioned in the article or on HN. It has replaced Google for all but the most trivial queries. It runs circles around Google for finding anything niche or underspecified.
I use it through OpenRouter - I love how the pricing is per search and isn't a subscription.
- I am indeed looking into an alternative to Google recently, but more because of my need of a good search mcp server for my coding agents. I am thinking about either exa or kagi, but I have no idea which one is better. Also exa seems not quite frequently mentioned in the community, wondering why.
- I’ve been using Kagi for over a year (maybe two?) and it’s been tremendous. I can’t recommend it enough.
- I find the bigger problem now is how many top results on search engines are AI written websites.
- When even TechCrunch says that Google isn’t Google anymore, that’s like Mick Jagger saying you have a substance abuse problem.
- searxng works well but it's not perfect. I tried qwant for a bit but results were mediocre at best. Kagi, I've shared my views on why I'd never use it. I wouldn't use it even if they paid me to use it in fact. For the time being I'm swapping between searxng and ecosia, the latter has been giving me the best results for just about anything(and I hope their indexer partnership with qwant pays off). As for google - even before the change, results were absolute crap, not a recent thing but since around 2020, the quality of the result hit rock bottom and they have been hard at work, drilling into the rock ever since.
- Kagi finances Russian war crimes through licensing Yandex's search index.
- I've used Brave Search and found it better than Google's in some cases
- Which of these alternatives actually doesn't use Google under the hood?
- Brave.
- Also consider mojeek:
https://www.mojeek.com/about/why-mojeek
- a list of engines I ran across the other day: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...
The three dominant English search engines with their own indexes are Google, Bing, and Yandex but this list has many spiders and engines that traverse the web.
- If google stops driving traffic to the websites, website owners will have zero incentive put out new content, and then what?
- I liked Kagi a lot, but gave up on it as I couldn’t configure it as a default search engine on iOS. Ended up with Duckduck go.
by woadwarrior01
0 subcomment
- Ecosia is a greenwashing front-end for Google ads. Just like how DuckDuckGo is a privacy washing front-end for Bing ads.
- Unfortunately, search results on DuckDuckGo contain AI-generated descriptions. These sometimes contain mistakes.
- Actually, I think Gemini is great. And the AI overviews are quite good.
I think Google is getting its act back together.
- It annoys me to no end that Safari only gives you a limited set of search engines to pick from. Changing it to anything else requires a cumbersome trick of catching a search URL and redirecting to something else, which not only stops you from using that particular search engine, it makes every search slower you’re sending your query to two entities instead of one.
Seeing as Apple has reportedly partnered with Google to power their LLM offering, I don’t expect that to change soon. I hope I am wrong.
by Ylpertnodi
0 subcomment
- Brave search does well for me.
- Is it me or the mentions of Kagi on HN are overly positive?
- It seems like all of them are a proxy for Google search?
- Why would anybody search, when you can just ask?
- Before switching to seek.ninja I used DuckDuckGo.
- Does google have a option to avoid AI summaries?
- Reeks of product placement and astroturfing
by gcatalfamo
0 subcomment
- Honest question: isn't AI Google better than the Standard Google of the past 2 years?
I mean all the privacy concerns are still there, but the current product is just better than the SEO SPAM-ridded result page we used to have.
by globalnode
0 subcomment
- i have to use startpage since googs give me a captcha (that i refuse to complete) every time now.
by steveharing1
0 subcomment
- For me its either bing or duckduckgo
- If you can pay for it, use Kagi.
- I don’t see anyone talking about yacy.
https://github.com/yacy/yacy_search_server
I mean when we have solutions like hister and yacy that is so privacy conscious why are we still not using them to full extent. I understand it’s not easy, but this is post llm era :)
by amazingamazing
1 subcomments
- So much for llms replacing search
- Bing is dead I suppose?
&udm=14
by IAmGraydon
0 subcomment
- It’s crazy that a company like Google, full of very talented people, is making a decision that is so obviously bad. I’m convinced Silicon Valley is so deep in the AI hype machine that these guys have completely lost touch with reality and have no one left to ground them.
by iamalizard
0 subcomment
- What about a distributed way of doing search, does that exist?
Different people/bots scrape the net and add it to a distributed database optimized for search.
Each query could cost a crypto micropayment to avoid DDoS. Or maybe a slightly larger payment to download the whole database so you can use it privately or create a competing centralized or decentralized search.
Yes, we hate crypto, but it seems useful here. It's bad if 1 entity can gatekeep both the database and access to it, no matter how non-evil they seem now.
We might even index torrents, use speech-to-text for music, movies, video clips and other things like that. So you'll search for a phrase from a movie and it will be there even though no one mentions it on any website.
A couple of issues I can think of with that decentralized approach:
* copyright - fuck it, it's decentralized, it can index whole books, maybe partnering with Anna's Archive or LibGen. Maybe have a copyright-respecting database and another one that doesn't respect it if you foresee the man coming down on the project. Maybe the results from the DB that doesn't respect copyright is merged at query-time with the one that does. Or maybe, the DB that doesn't respect copyright is just a superset of the copyright-respecting DB. I don't know how easy it would be to simultaneously search more than 1 DB.
* privacy - it could run over Tor or at least allow people to access it via Tor. The privacy of the cryptocurrency also seems doable - we have Monero and other private coins but I'm not sure how easy it would be to implement private micropayments with these.
* spam, intentionally wrong archives/crawls - pay the people who submit sites something so they financial motivation to not lie. Some consensus-based reward mechanism could be used, not sure which one
* moderation, illegal content - we don't care about copyright but likely don't want real CSAM, real animal abuse and other obviously awful content. Rewards should also be able to be used somehow for moderators or for people flagging content. We might even have a decentralized way to flag/tag content for anything at all - "AI generated" or "human generated", "small web", "uses Cloudflare", etc..
* how the distributed database actually works, how searching it works, who connects to whom when making a query and so on. I hope there are smart people with knowledge on such systems (not me lol) who can shed some light on whether it's possible and how.
- For code: Kagi or phind. For general: Perplexity. For privacy: Brave. I use Google only when I need to find a specific Reddit thread now, ironically.
- DuckDuckGo?
by starkeeper
0 subcomment
- It is pretty sad that google has embraced enshitification for search results for what more than 10 years of decline now? And then this.
DuckDuckGo is about to surge!
- udm=14 is still working for me (for now) to disenshittify the results. You can use my Firefox extension to inject it: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search...
- They are all crap. The best seems to be, unfortunately, yandex.
- [flagged]
by Rekindle8090
0 subcomment
- [dead]
by rahadbhuiya
0 subcomment
- [dead]
by simianwords
4 subcomments
- I don't get the hysteria against LLM here? Like LLM's are the best thing to happen for search engines. They are a huge step above traditional ones like google. So what that google uses LLM's as a supplementary tool for no cost? This really looks like some ideological thing evoking visceral emotions.
If you really want the best search engine, ChatGPT with thinking mode enabled is by far the best search engine technology that exists today. There's nothing that comes close.
This one is also stupid:
> But if a search engine were to operate without ads, could it still make money?
> That’s what Kagi is trying to accomplish. For $5 per month — or $10 for unlimited searches — you can access an ad-free search engine without AI overviews.
UUuuh ChatGPT exists for $20 per month and does the best searches (amongst other things) and is also ad free.
----
Edit: getting downvoted
Firstly, it is pretty obvious to me and everyone else reading that this specific concern that the content producers won't make money is largely performative and insincere.
From the article:
> many users see this as yet another example of a tech company squeezing AI agents and chatbots into everything it can, making it impossible to navigate the internet without encountering a chatbot
This is purely ideological. I can say this because Ads, which are the very thing keeping content alive, is the very thing opposed generally by the same people.
Secondly, it is exactly Google, the company that pioneered ads, the thing that people take an issue with, are the ones doing this. Surely such a company knows how to balance ad revenue and long term user growth. If your concern is so valid that content creators won't make money, why do you think Google is doing all of this, especially when they are bound to lose their main source of revenue? It was Google that even made content creation possible by providing revenue.
Thirdly, and I can't prove it but I mean this in an normative and a positive way: AI for search is good for humanity, good for content creators as well. The large second order effects can't be explained but making it quick and easy for users to search and provide results for complicated prompts is a _good_ thing. I generally do click people's blogs and learn more about them and follow them.
In fact, if the concern were actually sincere, we would be seeing the second order effects more lucidly: lower SEO spam and higher quality publications.
I'm already seeing newer forms of content monetisation in the form of substack etc. This is by far a better, more aligned approach than SEO cat and mouse games. I also see advertisements working better because a rich prompt has better CTR which opens up a potentially better content economy. But I predict this very thing would infuriate the same people even more. "How dare I get more relevant ads and make Google richer??"
I'm sure what I typed up would be downvoted because of ideological reasons, but the few that think a bit more deeply might agree and see my point. Performative concern is tiring.
- You can't replace google, not in a million billion years..