this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
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As a concept, paid search engines is actually a good idea. It incentivize the company to produce great result so their users won't search over and over (which reduce their profit), unlike google which incentivized to reduce search quality so their users have to search over and over and see more ads (per the article). If it's not kagi, I hope other paid search engines start to appear in this space. Indexing the web is expensive, and after seeing what happened with google, it's clear that free ad-suported search engine is not the way to go now.
There’s an awful lot of things where if the incentives were to keep paying users happy instead of keeping advertisers happy we would see very different results from the service. Unfortunately, for an awful lot of these services people don’t want to pay for them, or at least don’t want to pay what it costs to make them financially viable.
The high cost of housing is squeezing people all over the globe and we're seeing a spike in homelessness in first-world countries from USA to Australia, where the affordability of housing is out of control, on top of explosive inflation of food costs.
It may not be that they "don't want to pay" but simply not enough people have enough discretionary income to pay enough to make the business financially viable.
I mean, that's what happened to Beeper and while I was a very early on their sign up list I decided to never give them any money. When it became clear they weren't able to keep things going on how much money they were making from paying users: Micigovsky sold to a larger company.
I think it's an issue that the services they're offering actually cost more than the market is actually effectively able to bear and they're trying to hide that fact with advertising and data sales to cover operating costs.
More simply put: Consumers don't actually have enough money anymore to be able to support a business, and businesses essentially now must rely on other businesses as customers to be able to functionally exist financially. Only other businesses have the finances to support new business.