[duckmysick]

I remember years ago there was a desktop application for Windows called Copernic Agent. It was a meta search tool that combined results from multiple search engines. It had free and paid versions. It's not exactly the same as paying for a search engine, but it's close enough. It looks like it's abandoned now and the company moved on to desktop and enterprise file searching.

Also, there are people who pay for API calls to a search engine, for example Bing Search. Again, it's not the same as users paying a monthly subscription for unlimited access, but someone is paying in the end.