[chris_f]

I launched a new search engine a few months ago and have been looking at several alternative ways to fund it, but none of them seem to be a viable path.

The best balance of privacy and user experience seems to be display ads related to search term context that don't do any tracking (like billboards in the real world). But even that isn't an easy proposition and will need a custom network built to generate those type of ads.

A lot of people say they will pay for a search engine, but it is such a small niche that I believe the cost would be prohibitively expensive, and the search engine would probably still be subpar to Google in many respect. Would you pay $10/month, what about $29? Those are most likely where the monthly fees would have to be for this type of product.

[calvinmorrison]

I would love a search engine that had a -ecommerce option. Sometimes I want to buy shocks for a f150, sometimes I want to see how to replace it. What i don't want is to wade through all the ecom sites.

[freediver]

Can you point to a site that has f150 shocks replacement information that it not commercial in nature? (no product sales/ads/newsletters/affiliate links) I am very curious and have a hard time finding one.

[dhimes]

This is exactly it. And I could fill in my own profile that I share. And when the switch is on the search engine would have access to it to filter ads and allow marketers to target me properly.

[eevilspock]

Do you realize how much we are all paying on average already to Google? There is no free lunch. Googles money comes from advertisers who get that money from us -- nearly everything we buy today has advertising and marketing costs baked in. For many things, those costs actually exceed materials and labor for the simple product.

Excerpt from an old comment of mine [1]:

Mozilla Research put the entire web's advertising revenue at $12.70/month per user. In other words, if they are right we are living with the consequences of advertising for a mere $13/month, $13 dollar they still get from us anyway because it's baked into the prices of the advertised products.

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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10043324

[chrsm]

I used to work for an ad network (BSA, Carbon Ads, etc) that does not intrusively track and believes in the effectiveness of quality one-ad-per-page. Try contacting @toddo on twitter or email me (in profile) and I'll forward it over.

Anyhow, I'd love to see something like this. I've switched to DDG but often have to reach for Google if I can't find relevant results.