Sincere question: what paid search do you have in mind?
How conceptually could a paid search engine solve the problem of SEO and spam? (Curation seems economically infeasible?)
Is what you're actually proposing ad-free search results? (I'd be willing to pay Google approximately $0.01 per search for this. I suspect this is probably more than they get from anything but the most expensive ads (pharma ads that confused old people will click on).)
What I would really love is a browsing-assistance agent based on something like an LLM that can summarize and de-cruft search results for me and show me content extracted from web pages in a standard format without any Javascript. (I don't need an LLM to be the arbiter of truth, I just want it to be good at summarizing documents.)
(Because Google is so wedded to the ad ecosystem I'm not sure I trust them to be the steward of technology that is basically about removing ads from my life.)
Kagi https://kagi.com/ is the paid search I've tried. It's was decent, but not a noticeable enough improvement to win me over as a customer.
OTOH, I am a paying ChatGPT Plus user and there are some days where I feel like I get my monthly subscription price's worth in a single day.
In terms of summarization, this study Anyscale just published is interesting - llama2-70b gets within a hairsbreadth of gpt-4/human scores for summarization, so it's conceivable that sometime soon, you might be able to run a local LLM on your browser and get decent results (4-bit quants of llama2-70b currently take about 40GB of memory, you need at least 2 x 24GB or 1 x 48GB GPU to run them at reasonable speeds atm): https://www.anyscale.com/blog/llama-2-is-about-as-factually-...
https://kagi.com/ is the one I see recommended. The results went to focus hard on "no blogspam" which is nice, and supposedly you can completely ban whole sites from your results forever (e.g. goodbye GeeksForGeeks and your shit SEO hacking)
