I'm sure many of us are familiar with the phrase I use for the title of this post. It's become a fairly common phrase in many online communities the past few years. It started in tech circles when people realized that Google was collecting so much information about us because they were selling that information to advertisers, and it started to dawn on everyone that Google's products really weren't so free after all: their terrible cost was our personal information. Hence:

If you're not paying for a product, you are the product.

Many paying products resulted from this realization. Whereas before it seemed like if a web service wasn't free no one would use it and so no one in their right mind would consider charging for anything, after this charging for services again became something of a normal thing.

Well, with everything... except search. Search engines remained a free thing. We did get many competitors to Google, maybe the most popular one being DuckDuckGo, but they all remained free. DuckDuckGo itself really plays up the privacy angle, but at the same time their primary way of making money is the same as Google's: selling ads. Given that... is there anything preventing them from going down Google's dark path eventually? Remember:

If you're not paying for a product, you are the product.

They recently started offering a paid VPN, but VPN is kind of a niche product and one wonders if they can possibly make enough from this service to pay for their search engine. It seems unlikely, so the ads will probably continue, as might the slow creep to becoming Google 2.0.

Given this, is it crazy to actually think of search as a paid product?

I recently came across this site: https://kagi.com. It is a paid search engine. You get 300 searches a month for $5, or unlimited for $10. The site is clean, and it seems to have fairly good reviews from people who have tried it. It is actually more of a metasearch engine, as it gets its results primarily from other search engines. However, it does spider the small-web, as in small blogs, people who don't sell advertising, etc.

It has some cool features, such as allowing users to upvote or downvote sites, as well as allowing you to block sites you don't want to show up in your results. That's a feature I've wanted for years. It also tells you right in the search results if a site has ads and trackers on it and how many of each.

Needless to say, since it charges money, there are no ads on it. We presumably are no longer the product on this site since we are paying for it.

In the grand scheme of things $5 a month isn't a lot. The comparisons to a cup of coffee are overdone, but they are good because we do waste a lot of money on overpriced coffee, and most people pay way more than $5 for one of these shitty coffee-like drinks with way too much sugar and way too little actual coffee. We waste money on these drinks, so is $5 for a search too much?

I don't know. I do like the idea of paying for things. Because again:

If you're not paying for a product, you are the product.

I pay for Proton mail for this reason instead of using a free email service.

But search? I'm still considering my thoughts here, if it would be worth it or no. But what do you think?

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David is an American teacher and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Twitter or Mastodon.