I feel like there are probably some ad based search engines which are privacy and service oriented, but in general even for those there remains a misalignment problem. Hence if I don’t want to be a product now or in the future, what good search engines are there that I can pay for?
Yeah, and on the smaller / earlier side of a theoretical search engine company, google offers their api for free. I think this is actually another one of the biggest contributors to why nobody has tried to make a new search engine with their own index. Why waste hundreds of thousands of dollars in hardware, and even more on personnel costs, when you can just have google do it for you instead?
Yes offering everything for free to prevent competition has been a surprisingly effective strategy for Google.