Not a technical person, as I understand it, Google and Bing are full search engines while options like Seaexng, Ecosia, Duckduckgo are meta search engine that depend on Google or Bing. Are there other search engines that are fully independent, and if there aren’t, what are the barriers that stop other search engines from emerging
Your search engine in a very real way is your internet. Nearly everything you see online starts there.
If you aren’t paying for it, someone else is. And the reason they’re paying, is to make sure you get the internet they want; Not the one you want. If you want the internet to be what you want, you have to be the one to pay for it.
I don’t know where you live, but in most of the developed world $10 is roughly the cost of a single lunch. Not even a fancy one. What’s worth more to you? An inexpensive lunch? Or making sure the internet you see in your search, is what you want to see, instead of what someone else wants you to see?
That’s actually a good way of quantifying the price.
QFT right here. I just started using Kagi this month after being very impressed by the trial period. The $5/month starter plan gives an average of 10 searches per day. It doesnt seem like much but that’s a decent amount of searching for my personal use case. Truth be told I’ll probably end up going for the family plan at $20/month. Up to six users with unlimited search for less than a Netflix subscription.