15 years ago with the current state of search engines I would have said I would be willing to subscribe to a search engine that’s not disgustingly infested with advertising on the back end of things and actually just worked like google did in like 2000-2003. A search engine that indexed the web and tried to display the best result for a query, not the most promoted one. Where the biggest concern for quality was people gaming the system (before that was deeply rebranded as a positive thing, “seo”) and google actually taking steps to fight against it instead of embracing it and just charging money to openly promote like 50%+ of the first page. Back when you could actually get a list of all the results instead of this nonsense now where it’s an endlessly extending single page so if you go to a link deep in the results without opening a new tab you lose your place and start over.
But now I have 10 million services asking me to subscribe and from experience I know that the subscription payments won’t stop them from letting advertising intrude on compromising the quality of the product anyway so fuck that. The only thing I would possibly trust them to remove is visible ads and obviously promoted listings but otherwise it would just look like the search page with an adblocker. Still useless at its core because they’ve let the admen infect their search algorithm and remove any sense of objectivity for years now