Every month I see my user experience decline with Google, in so much a paid search solution would be a blessing.
Imagine a search engine that truly is private, containerized search and does not need to sell you anything. It only wants to serve you true relevance and accuracy. That engine also skips over all monetized sites that serve more than 5-10% ads. Prefers cookieless sites. That search engine would be bliss.
Working on much of this at Neeva. We have a free tier, no ads cluttering the results. Just focused on the user experience. We also offer a premium tier for those who are keen to support us.
We have been working on exactly that at Neeva and the response has been very positive in terms of growth and adoption. Neeva offers a freemium model (free basic and premium for $5/Month which includes paid versions of VPN and a password manager), you can connect third party apps like dropbox and email putting all your personal docs in one search along with websearch, both versions are ad-free and private, it's available to anyone in U.S. and we are building our own independent stack to make the search experience unique and better.
Maybe not dominate the market, take over the world, but not every thing has to be that.