I've been trying to be less hypocritical about saying "if you're not paying you're the product". In light of that, I pay for an email provider. I pay for a few newspapers. I pay Google for a few things; drive, and their directions API. After doing this for the last year or so I'm realizing how ridiculous it was that I ever worried about signing up for stuff when it's five bucks a month - for most people on HN I suspect that's utterly unnoticeable.

But I have to admit, Google's search is pretty nice, and I've never found a substitute. I just hate the tracking and ads. Mostly the tracking, though.

Is there a company I can pay for Google-quality search so they make money off of that instead of by selling my info to advertisers? Barring that, is there some other way of doing this that's a more sustainable business model? Or hell, maybe a self-hosted search engine, though I doubt that's feasible... Every time I try Duckduckgo I find myself coming back to Google.