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Re:EU privacy agency urges more safeguards to curb U.S. tech... by GradientAssent on Friday February 12, 2021 @11:28AM (#26115367)
Would you pay, say, $120/year? What if it wasn't nearly as good as Google yet?
Re:EU privacy agency urges more safeguards to curb U.S. tech... by stiray on Friday February 12, 2021 @02:00PM (#26117170)
Yes I would. Based on the really, really crappy results that google gaves me out lately (I have actually quit using it), $12 a year seems more than reasonable (you have market of millions of users, charging $10 / month is ripoff). Under condition that it is not some ads company under disguise (like google), that they eliminate all SEO crap (i dont want those results anywhere near the 100th page of results) and ads from my results and serve me relevant content.

Instead of google I am aggregating multiple search engines and joining the results eliminating all that are not on most of them. I am losing anything special (like there is something "special" today) but at least I dont get bunch of stuff on google that just wastes my time.

Nextgrid: yes, exactly that. I want old results, I want old content, I want content that matches with my search words 100% instead of getting what google crappy algorithms think that I want. I dont want hipster crap that propagates next silver bullet (that is just a copy what we already had packed into SaaS).

Re:EU privacy agency urges more safeguards to curb U.S. tech... by GradientAssent on Friday February 12, 2021 @02:50PM (#26117804)
> Based on the really, really crappy results that google gaves me out lately

People on Hacker News seem to think Google's results have gotten worse over time. Maybe they have for the narrow set of interests and requirements of this crowd, but I'm very confident they've gotten better for the vast majority of other users (users who I bet are less likely to use an ad blocker too).

> That they eliminate all SEO crap (i dont want those results anywhere near the 100th page of results) and ads from my results and serve me relevant content.

This is an extremely difficult engineering problem. Google doesn't make a conscious decision to include low/middling quality SEO'd content. That content is optimized to appear relevant and high quality. Google does a better job than say Bing at telling the difference, but it's still obviously an unsolved problem.

Re:EU privacy agency urges more safeguards to curb U.S. tech... by Nextgrid on Friday February 12, 2021 @11:42AM (#26115498)
I'd happily pay that for a search engine equivalent to what Google was a decade ago.
Re:EU privacy agency urges more safeguards to curb U.S. tech... by arch-ninja on Friday February 12, 2021 @01:42PM (#26116941)
I'd pay double that right now for any search engine that gave 10 results in <1 second.