So where do I go for my free mp3 sex now?

...i used dogpile for awhile back when the market fostered a healthy ecosystem of competing search engines, but at some point in the late nineties it quickly became apparent that its best results were all coming from google, so i cut out the middleman...

...i quit using google maybe fifteen years later, after they fully embraced evil; unfortunately the search market still hasn't recovered from google's dominance...

DDG is just Bing in disguise. It's nowhere near as good as google used to be back in last century.

Well the main thing for them now is to sell more ads...

Search never made them money. Ads do. Ads are their thing.

We need to figure out a way to host content on the web that is just part of the network, without needing servers or big tech companies.

It’s not really possible I know but we need to anyway.

I'm not against a subscription for something like this. Kagi has ongoing server costs, I think it's only fair that users pay on an ongoing basis.

As opposed to, say, Office where the software can be more or less "finished" and I don't need or want updates.

I hear you - a one off purchase (or a $50-100 for 5yrs) would be a selling point. Hell, I'd even buy credits like I do for USENET.

https://stephango.com/quality-software

Just let me pay in one lump sum. Not a fan of rolling subscriptions; never end up using the whole quota, so unless there's a rollover it gets wasted.

Self hosted SearXNG is an option but it's going to be pulling from Bing, Google etc, so the result quality ceiling is capped by those engines. Kagi is trying to be a better search engine overall and not just a private wrapper around existing ones, IIUC.

Personally, I find myself not really searching much any more. I sort of know which sites I need and go there directly. Anything low value goes thru ddg-lite or (gasp) my LLM.

EDIT: Huh...my LLM just told me to sit down

"Kagi supports PayPal and OpenNode (Bitcoin) as alternative payment methods. Crucially, these do not create a subscription. They top off your account with credits, which then fund your Kagi membership. That's essentially the lump-sum/credits model you described"

Well then....I sit corrected.

Yep. Last I looked, they used both GAFAM and their own infra (teclis)? I think the goal is to eventually move solely to their own infra / web indexing.

Tbh, I dunno how much longer "search" is going to be a unique category. I think we're probably going to need to move to personal AI fetch tools, as grim as that sounds, that can filter out shit news sources using trusted domains, white lists / black lists, as blockers etc. Think like ublock but for search.

I think that's how lots of people use ChatGPT tbh; I'm not a fan of that. I'd favour a more local / self hosted AI agent. Something like Perplexica?

https://github.com/kiranz/perplexica

Actually, fuck it: maybe I'll build that myself.

The surface web is cooked / enshittified almost beyond use and we might need to fight fire with fire.

Because you were the product.

They have em and you can use em, but you can also turn them off AFAIK.

The bots they have are pretty good too. Lots of open source heavy hitters with ZDR (zero data retention policies)

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/llms-privacy.html

PS: no affiliation with kagi at all. I just like their product, even though their search engine conflates me with someone else.