Beyond that, the money is still going to Google, Yandex, Brave, Bing etc via API payments. If they actually created their own search engine that was any good I’d be more inclined to pay for access.
I have been looking at kagi but their pricing is definitely made to force people to buy the professional $10 package.
100 or even 300 searches/day would be unusable for me, you quickly spend 10 searches refining a query for something special, and when developing you do like 5-10 searches/hour.
I can’t imagine there was even that much lost revenue. Cached pages are good for seeing basic content in that page but you can’t click through links or interact with the page in any way. Were so many people using it to avoid ads?
I doubt that as well. There are much better ways to deal with ads. I always only used it when the content on the page didn’t exist anymore or couldn’t be accessed for whatever reason.
But I suspected this was coming, they’ve been hiding this feature deeper and deeper in the last few years.
but you can’t click through links or interact with the page in any way
Most of the time that’s exactly what I want. I hate hunting through 473 pages of stupid bullshit in some janky forum to try to find the needle in that haystack.
Seeing many comments here shitting on this decision by google, is this really that big of a deal? I’ve personally never used the cached feature of Google and if I ever needed to see a page that is currently down, it’d be via wayback machine. If nobody used the feature, why have it waste a ton worth of storage space? Feel free to prove me wrong though.
It was also useful when the page had changed inbetween google indexing it and now, so if you loaded the page and couldn’t find the text you were searching for because it was deleted, you could find it on the cached page.
Ya I’m just surprised to hear the feature still exists. I remember the option to view cached page disappearing from every search result I would try to use it on years ago.
Not really but I’m disgusted with the continual downgrading of Google Search and it’s hyper-focus on increasing profitability at the cost of user experience and data privacy.
I was already toying with searXNG anyway, so it’s not a big leap.
A few months back Ruud stood up a copy: searxng.world
I’ve been using it, and it tends to be as good as or better than google’s search. There’s only been a handful of instances where I’ve explicitly used google’s.
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