>> charge
Cory Doctorow’s most recent post is about switching to Kagi, which is $10/month, $14 for a couple, $20 for a family.
He says it reminds him of when he switched from Alta Vista, which had become utterly spam infested, to Google.
The thing is, Kagi is built using Google data (and Mojeek and Wikipedia and others). The noteworthy thing about this is that it shows that Google’s shitty results are not because of a data problem or an algorithm problem or (as a lot of people who don’t know much about it say) SEO. No, it is because of a CHOICE to offer a shitty product and use Payola to be the default search engine.
It has me thinking a lot about how much free has cost us a society. We accept that streaming costs money and cloud storage costs money and password managers cost money. But we let search and networking platforms be “free” and now it’s a cesspool.
On the other hand, everyone wants $10/month which means I’m going to choose one or two or three of those services, not 20. Which is why there are so many “free with ads” or “cheaper with ads” streaming services.
For what ever reason, I refuse to use ad-supported streaming, but readily use ad-supported search. I don’t understand myself sometimes.