Comment by fenwick67
8 hours ago
I'm not so sure. Much like search engines, you can run one yourself or pay Kagi but most people prefer to keep their money and deal with the ads. Streaming services have demonstrated that people have a pretty high tolerance for ads.
Search so far has not been overly pushy with ads. It's easy enough to gain the instinct of scrolling down after each search. There's little incentive for people to seek out an ad free alternative.
That changes with local AI though. There is now incentive to integrate and further develop self hosted search. You can see it happening on AI services already, using their own internal search engines for better reasoning and more accurate results.
I suspect Google's censorship and intentional worsening of search results to increase traffic would've been enough on its own to eventually drive people to self hosted search as it became trivial to setup.
Streaming entertainment is different, there's usually no legal alternatives. Either you pay extra for no ads, or you put up with the ads. You could easily say that streaming services have demonstrated that people don't have a high tolerance for ads as well. One of the major drivers to streaming from cable TV was the lack of ads at the time.