Yes, except for it’s Bing search not Google

Step 1: astroturf on lemmy

Step 2:?

Step 3: profit!

I’m with you on that. I’m also pretty sure my wife would leave me if I tried to force her to use some weird non-standard search engine and browser instead of the thing that literally everyone else uses. She has no interest in any of this.

But the fact that people like you and me, the kind of people who comment on threads like this on lemmy, are balking at the price of kagi really lays it all bare. $20/month is probably a tiny fraction of what google makes off selling our data. Their ad revenue is on the order of $25/person for every man, woman, and child in the world. But given that huge swaths of the world aren’t online, or are in a place where Google isn’t the default, or don’t make enough money to be worth marketing expensive products to, people like you and me and our families are probably worth many multiples of that annual revenue.

Yet we balk at paying to opt out, even though we know we should. If we’re not willing to do it, who is? And what possible solution is there?

This is both terrifying and hilarious at the same time. The last paragraph is so good.

In another indication of the operators working to potentially inefficient quotas, Meta noted that the pages it had on Facebook, with around 560,000 followers, “were likely acquired from spam operators with built-in inauthentic followers primarily from Vietnam, Bangladesh and Brazil” meaning the pages “that mainly posted in Chinese and English were almost exclusively followed by accounts from countries outside of their target regions.”

But when you listen to jam bands random YouTube videos ARE the high quality music!

My biggest takeaway from this article is that I should get into the white noise game on Spotify. Even if I only make 1/20th of the quoted revenue for a few months it will be worth it

I love YouTube music. I get all the same songs as the other big services, plus free YouTube premium. Between my jam and habit and my quixotic quest to teach myself woodworking, I watch a LOT of YouTube videos.

I guess google will just have to suck less if they want us to keep using it.

I’m not sure what to think about the price. I can’t really imagine life without a search engine, even though I was alive for a couple of decades before search engines existed. I pay $400/month for my car, but my search engine arguably gives me more value (I am lucky not to need to drive a lot). I wouldn’t pay $400/month for a search engine. But $5-10 to have a degree of freedom from the tracking and results that aren’t just trying to get my money? I am intrigued.

I had google play music. Then it became youtube music with youtube premium. They just raised the price on my family subscription by 40%. I considered leaving for spotify, where at least I’d be able to share playlists with all my friends, or apple music because I’m an iphone person now, I guess.

But the ad-free, full-featured youtube is the thing that is keeping me. I won’t save significant money by switching, but I’ll be giving up something I really get some value out of.

If they change their pricing so that it is significantly cheaper for me to use another service and premium youtube isn’t just a bonus I get for paying for my music, I may reconsider. But for now, the package is unbeatable even at the new higher price.