Interview: The Real Costs of Free Search Engines | 1Password

I've been a customer of Kagi for a while now and I've been happy with it. This interview with the CEO is a good read. The first things I insisted on paying for due to privacy concerns were email, feed readers, and storage. But as soon as paid search options were good enough it was obvious to me to make that switch for many reasons including this one.

In every transaction, there is a currency. Because the price of using a search engine is zero, people assume there is no currency involved because we usually measure value in monetary terms. The truth is that the currency used here is your time. Your mental cycles, your productivity, the fact that every search you make and every website you visit is being tracked.

I also like this highlight

There is this wonderful quote by Ian Bremmer, a political scientist. He said: “The fact that we as citizens are getting information from the world’s largest advertising company is my definition of dystopia.” So, it’s not just the individual – society as a whole is paying a pretty big price by outsourcing the information consumption to what is the world’s largest advertising company.

Considering the role that search plays in how you inform yourself and discover content online getting search that is incentivized to help you versus an advertiser seems like a good idea.