Sorry, I don't know enough about it to comment specifically this case, but in general I think that pay-to-search would be great (run by a corp or gov - both ways have their own future dev risks).

Search engines shouldn't be financially motivated, they are too important - but if subscriptions are the only motivation (and search engine the only business!) that indeed mitigates a lot of the core concerns I have. I would pay for Google's search engines (if packaged in an independent corp) from two decades ago.

You know, if it's free, you are the product. It's not like you don't currently "pay" for using Googles shit, it's just not in a way you immediately see.

Generally speaking, services you don't run locally seem like a logical thing to have a price tag, you outsource the "work" (of the service) not just the dev.

[–] princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 6 hours ago

Search engines are also super difficult to run locally well in my experience. Stuff like SearXNG are okayy, but they just pull entirely from other site's indexes. Having any sort of index of your own is much harder. Yacy is intriguing, it's a P2P concept but it just never seemed to work well.