Would you pay for an ad-free search engine?

Would you pay for an advertisement-free search engine?

A handful of search engines dominate the market. There’s Google Search, which dominates in most regions, Bing, Baidu and Microsoft’s Yandex.

Core functionality is shared between search engines. You can search, use some filters, or browse only results for specific content types. All these search engines have in common that they generate income through advertising.

Privacy-focused search engines began gaining popularity after 9/11 and the Snowden revelations. Search engines like DuckDuckGo or Startpage appeared, promising no user tracking and less advertising. These search engines use the indexes of the major search engines, for example, Startpage uses the Google index and DuckDuckGo uses the Bing index.

Only a handful of search engines use their own index, with the European one Qwant the search engine is one of them.

Now it seems that another type of search engine is gaining popularity. Search engines that are not free, but require a monthly subscription. Although this doesn’t sound good at first, considering that all other search engines are free to use, using these search engines also has its advantages.

Search engines com snow or Come in promises to do things differently. These search engines earn revenue through subscriptions and not through advertising. In fact, the search results are ad-free.

As a result, search results pages only show search results and no ads. Neeva claims that 40% of results are filled with ads on major search engines.

Both of the aforementioned services offer a free plan that is limited in terms of the number of searches. Neeva offers 50 free searches per week, Kagi 50 free searches per month. These limits are waived for paying customers.

Kagi and Neeva support additional features that users may find useful. Kagi, for example, supports changing the weight of individual websites in search, displaying discussions or lists in relevant results, focused searches through lens functions or website information that includes the use of advertisements or trackers in search results.

Neeva also includes a suite of features, including search result customizations and options to prioritize news sources and retailers over others.

Skipping advertising comes at a cost: Neeva Premium is available for $4.95 per month ($4.16 if paid annually), Kagi for $10 per month.

Neeva uses data from a variety of sources, including Microsoft Bing, and its own search crawler and indexer to populate its results. Kagi gets data from Google, Bing and others.

Would you pay for search engines without ads?

Search engines that are not funded through advertising offer several advantages over ad-driven competition. Search results are focused on content, while search engines like Google have added more and more ads to search results. Sometimes all users see when they search on Google are above-the-fold ads.

Commercial search engines finance operations through subscriptions. The question is: How many Internet users are willing to pay a monthly fee for ad-free searches?

Now you: would you pay for a search engine without ads?

Summary