Earlier quoted context omitted.
A subscriber-supported search engine sounds cool to me. Any precedent?
Kagi.com does this. In closed beta at the moment, but you can email and request access.
The basic results are good with some nice touches here and there like including a "blast from the past" section with older results which is actually what I sometimes want and another section where it widens up a bit (i.e. what Google does by default?).
Furthermore you can apply pre defined search "lenses" that focuses your search, or even make your own, and you can boost or de-rank sites.
I had not expected this to happen so quickly but I'm going to move from DDG to kagi as my default search engine for at least a couple of days because I am fed up with both Googles and DDGs inability to actually respect my queries.
If ir continues to work as well as it does today I'll happily pay $10 a month and I might also buy 6 months gift cards for close friends and family for next Christmas.
Think about it, unlike an ad financed engine incentives are extremely closely aligned here: the smartest thing Kagi can do is to get my results as fast as possible to conserve server resources (and delight their customer).
For an ad financed engine abd especially one that also serves ads on search results pages as well the obvious thing to do is to keep me bouncing between tweaking my search query and various that almost has my question answered but not quite.
(That said, if one us going to stay mainstream I recommend DDG over Google since 1. for me at least Googles results are just as bad and 2. with DDG it is at least extremely easy to check with Google as well to see if they have a better result 3. competition is good)