It's cheaper for a webstore to pay one good website personally, and people trust ads like that a lot more. It's almost like a personal recomendation from the team curating knowledge base.

And no ad trackers, plus quicker website, win/win|win situation for everybody

People want things for free. Too bad. Nothing is really free. Either you pay for it, have ads, or have your taxes pay for it as part of public media. Personally, I'd like to see forced ads banned. Having ads that the user can come to see is fine (e.g. I'm looking for a product and I want to browse pitches, totally fine). That means that yes, we need a way where news can get paid. Most big news companies already offer paid tiers, they just continue to shove ads even then.

Same as they do now. The quality ones charge for their content. The low-quality ones survive on serving ads to the masses.

Maybe if adblockers become more widespread that will start to happen, right now ad networks seem to just allow anything.

Like if I'm reading a cooking article and there's an add to the side for some cooking gadgets or something like that, sure why not!

the bad ad ecosystem is where there's whole demand, supply side platforms and ad exchanges that mine and sell your data.

now there's better tech to do native ads without the intrusion and massive bad experience.

you're reading some article about EV's - then boom the publisher themselves can serve you a small ad - not serve you an ad about weight loss or viagra or any other shit stuff.

It didn’t catch on back then. But time are changing.

I heard that argument many times before, and to this I can only say: if your revenue model is based on pestering real humans, you need to go extinct. So if they die that is great. The sooner we can get rid of companies that build their existence on pester-harassing people, the better. The days of infiltrating people's minds via ads are over - these companies just have not realised that yet. I live a 100% ad-free life (ok, that's not really possible, since sometimes I still see ads, but I strive towards that ideal - the sooner companies that rely on ads go extinct, the better, and the more they complain, the more convinced I am that they must go extinct today rather than tomorrow).

Of course this creates second order effects. If no one ever views the ads on the review and recipe sites, those sites will disappear. Then what do the LLMs reference? Parametric knowledge? Google is trying to get ahead of this with "Google Zero:" an internet in which one never leaves Google because they cache and serve everything a user could ever want. All stolen from other websites, of course.

I hope we end up back at the internet of the 90s. Small, unmonitised hobby spaces. Unfortunately bots will be 99% of all internet traffic within a few years, so how do we protect these spaces from unsolicited spam, disinformation campaigns, trolling, etc? We might actually go and touch some grass and re-learn how to socialise in person. This is not a bad thing.

I actually started making an LLM-powered browser extension that I thought could read the page and determine if it passed a smell test and block it if it didn't meet some strict criteria I'd set for her, but I didn't get very far before I became too concerned about prompt injection. Wanted to do the same on her e-mail, because gmail's built in filters sometimes let her down, but same concern. Prompt injection there may be trivial as well.

The moral dimension is also completely illusory. Ukraine is fighting a war of attrition that's funding is due to the same cold-hearted power politics that Russia subscribes to. It greatly benefits the US and EU to keep Russia in an expensive, resource-intensive, prolonged military engagement. Put another way, the US is knowingly sacrificing Ukrainian lives and infrastructure because it gives us more power; however, at the end of the day we get to drape our actions in nice sounding rhetoric about supporting national independence even though that is merely accidental. Not to mention that the Ukrainian government has legitimately persecuted Russian-speaking minority populations in the country. Obviously, this has very little to do Russia's actual motivations for the war, but the point is the Russia's actions also have accidental good effects.

I’m sure if there was an open, comparable index they would happily just use that but if you want to change the landscape and slowly build up your own index you’ll have to make some pragmatic choices that might not be so black and white.

I wish it were not necessary to use search indexes from multiple countries I do not like, but the American government and American companies have decided they should be in charge of what users are allowed to see. I see no alternative.

> and ban you

I was wrong about the banning; I misremembered that.

I did have a former job that would pay for Kagi for employees and I used Kagi for well over a year via that. When I left the job I went back to DDG to see if I would notice a quality drop, and I did not, so I decided not to pay for a personal account.

Annoying regardless, but arguably Safari is doing the right thing here.