Why pay for a search engine

I hope Kagi succeeds. But personally, I think the web is dead. And no search engine can save it.

SEO spam has been strangling the web for years. Now, genAI SEO spam has escalated that onto inhuman levels. To make matters worse, no one wants to post to the open web anymore because their posts are just going to drown in that sea of spam and only genai's data stealing bots will read them. As the amount of spam posted to the web increases, the amount of worthwhile content posted decreases. Eventually, nothing of value will be posted. (like facebook?)

You can lay the blame for the web's death squarely at Google's feet for allowing SEO to hijack search in the first place (or maybe the government is to blame for not breaking up Google's ad/search empire fast enough). Either way, the big companies all know the end is here and are gambling on genai to replace search. Already, places of knowledge are closing their borders and charging fees for genai to access.

We have entered the internet's dark age.

Fun aside: I think it's hilarious and fitting that Google's genai model sucks. And I hope they lose the genai wars (just out of spite, not because I think any other genai is worth a shit).

Let say government nationalise google search or force to make it a non profit 15 years ago. How would that prevent SEO from happening? Isn’t SEO an inevitable outcome of website trying compete for attention? How would anyone prevent it from happening?

The same way people make adblockers happen. By making block lists of SEO garbage cruated by human beings.

Nextdns and the RPi alternative do it. Kagi has all the infrastructure in place to make it happen at the search level, it just requires more manual work right now.

How would you define “SEO garbage”. Who has the power to decide what belongs in the list.