[eitland]

I have paid about $5 a month for a couple of years for the most promising Google+ replacement I could find at the time. At some point after sending feedback multiple times on a specific pain point I gave up.)

Today I'm paying $20 for Marginalia while I wait for Kagi (and because I love Marginalia and the ideas behind it).

I'd probably pay for a "cloud provider with seatbelts" too for learning/testing (e.g. "GCP"/"AWS"/"Azure" but without the possibility to empty my bank account. Bonus if it let me attempt that without doing it and immediately tell me I messed up, etc.)

Edit: there are probably a number of other things I would buy if I could buy them in the form of tokens, not a monthly subscription. I have serious subscription fatigue so I try to only pay subscribtions for stuff that I love or need.)

[marginalia_nu]

To be fair, my search engine isn't really trying to be google, it's more of an exploration and discovery tool even though it dresses up as a search engine and sometimes does a decent job at it.

Unless someone sends me a ton of money, I just don't have the budget to be more than that. I also think the "better google" space is getting a bit crowded anyway, I think there's probably more interesting niches to be carved out in the general space of discovery.

[eitland]

Of course if I had to choose between Marginalia and Google I'd probably have to choose Google.

But don't underestimate the value of proving that it is possible to create a delightful (fast, less patronizing, less spamful, surfaces more real content) search engine without having a FAANG budget or backing from a national state or someone with a FAANG budget.

Edit: also don't underestimate how cool it is. ;-)

[marginalia_nu]

Yeah, I do think that's sort of one goal of it, a "show, don't tell" contradiction about some of the less well founded assumptions that seems widely accepted about software development and webdesign. It's too easy to dismiss words.

[sharikous]

How does marginalia work for you? I am using kagi and it's really nice but it still has some misses, especially for non-English content

[eitland]

Marginalia puts a smile on my face.

Just knowing that there is one Swede with one tower PC doing what almost everyone on HN thinks needs redundant datacenters, sysadmin teams, ux teams and what not gives me some hope for the future of the web.

Oh, another reason: every time I use it, either searching for something or using the explore function it proves that the old web isn't dead.

And sometimes it gives very good results that I wouldn't have found otherwise (ln topics like linux, git etc).