I would never pay for search. The obvious solution here to browse behind Tor or a VPN, or to physically move to an English speaking country if you want to live in a 100% English environment.
The obvious solution here is actually to pay for search. Then the company actually cares about keeping you happy, because you are their source of revenue.
In principle, yes, but in practice the privacy claims are unverifiable. A for-pay search provider may stick track you and serve you ads (in the ranking of results) and will probably do an even better job than Google at it since they can verify your identity through payment and profile you accurately no matter what device you use.
Whatever you do, you are paying for the search in some manner.
With DuckDuckGo, you are being served non-targeted ads. If you go through the trouble of setting anything up to avoid some of the public search engine pitfalls, you are paying with time and effort, and maybe even subscriptions on top like VPN and similar.
Obviously, ad networks want people to have this mindset, and while I have no issue with "stick it to them", it's always going to be an uphill battle.
I actually believe we need distributed and federated p2p search engine built, but trusting the results is hard with that: perhaps this is where blockchain approach (to store hashes of indexed pages?) could bring real value?
Of those options, paying for search seems like the cheapest.
A VPN might win on price (sometimes? kagi is just $5/mo), but relocating countries to get better results when searching for code related stuff feels a bit over-optimized. And as we know, premature optimization is the root of all evil.
I’m curious, why not? The amount of time and frustration saved seems insane, which seems to be a net positive, unless you can’t afford it of course (which is a good argument, but I’m not seeing any in your comment).
Because there are free and privacy respecting alternatives. I use DuckDuckGo, but you can also use meta-engines that anonymize traffic like SearXNG. None of these require accounts or payment methods that effectively de-anonymize you. Finally, if you really like Google for some reason but don't want the side effects, use an adblocker and a VPN.
Software can absolutely be free as in freedom and as in beer. Once code exists, it costs basically nothing to duplicate, so generally speaking it does not make sense to pay for it. When you pay for games for example these days, you are essentially paying for online play (servers) and to fund future development, in addition to "pure profits."
