Using "Google Premium" to Search a Wasteland is the Very Definition of Gullibility

If people stopped paying for smartphones, smartphones would be given away for free. It's imperative to the corporatocracy that society uses these things, and the authorities have already proved that if the user won't pay, they will. But to an extent, precedent excuses phone purchases, as phones have always carried a price tag. Search engines, conversely, are already free. To start renting access to them just as the Web empties itself of value, takes a special kind of fool.

I've said it before, but in capitalism, there is no such word as enough...

I bring this up because there's arisen a notion that the consumer is a zero-sum proposition to a commercial enterprise. Someone who can either be the customer, or the product, but never both. So if the consumer is paying, they must be the customer, and therefore they can't be the product. This notion is the result of weak marketing combined with a much stronger component of mental laziness on the part of the public. You really don't have to think that hard to realise that the greed upon which capitalism is founded, is the very antithesis of zero-sum dynamics. That is:

• However much money you pay a commercial enterprise, you will not stop it from wanting more. And if it can straightforwardly claw in more money from a paying consumer by selling them as a product, without them even knowing about it, it's a safe assumption that it will do so.

Enter subscription websearch, and its quaint claim that because you're handing over money, the company is making enough revenue, and thus will not subject you to any of the extractive subterfuge, censorship or propaganda that comes with using subscription-free alternatives. You'll get great results, you won't be spied on, micro-monitored or surveilled, and you won't see any ads.

That's the theory. In practice it's rather a different story.

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SUBSCRIPTION WEBSEARCH IS GOOGLE PREMIUM - WHATEVER BRANDING IT WEARS

Let's start with a reality check. No independent websearch provider has ever been able to deliver Google-style results - much less deliver Google-style results with improvements in query-matching. To understand why Google Search has proved impossible for genuine newcomers to replicate, we have to take onboard the dynamics behind its market stranglehold.

Google has overwhelming advantages in websearch not because its technology is somehow irreplicable, but because:

• It gained enough market share to issue orders to website admins, and have them build their sites specifically to accommodate Google, whilst presenting obstacles to other search engines.
• Google's surveillance-reach enables it to personalise its search results per user. Even before you type, Google knows what you want to see. Unless you're totally anonymised - in which case you see diabolical results, proving Google's reliance on user-surveillance for satisfactory responses.
• It has further strangleholds over browser architecture and Web standards, which once again enable it to disrupt competition and preference its own systems.
• On web-estate it owns, controls, financially co-opts and rank-whips (and that's a vast chunk of the everyday Web), Google can and does directly derail rivals' efforts to effectively crawl and index content. Not even Microsoft has had the resources to battle this without running to the lawyers with a blank cheque.

These conditions make it literally impossible for a genuine market newcomer to replicate Google's product. Even with tens of $billions in venture capital, they'd still somehow have to reverse the effects of Google's SEO diktat, create a surveillance network that gives them a presence in almost 100% of web connections, purchase YouTube, etc. That's why every brand introducing a search engine intended to compete with Google, has simply proxied its core results either from Google itself or from Microsoft.

So if a small search "startup" comes along with a premium version of Google, it CANNOT be independent. It MUST have Google behind it.

When using freemium services, you don't get a different privacy policy when you "upgrade" to a paid plan. Ever. There is not a single freemium service that has a separate privacy policy for subscribers. How much more proof do you need that the "subscription = privacy protection" claim is a lie? Paying for privacy that you can't possibly know whether or not you're getting, is just about as demented as purchasing a historic bridge from a besuited random on the streets of London.

Google itself did not hatch from the position of an ordinary startup. It was propped up by massive US Government surveillance investment and proxied intelligence funding for at least five years. It was the designated poster child for mass surveillance. Part of a scripted progression that began with the Mosaic browser in the early 1990s, didn't quite click into gear with Netscape, and was incubated through the volatile boom and bust era with investment in a new strategy - a powerful search capability which would unlock the inner workings of citizens' minds.

The reality is that in order to replicate Google, a provider has to be Google. Google under an alias. Therefore, when you pay for something that looks like a premium version of Google, you're really just buying a Google service that has an alternative brand name attached to it.

Kagi - the current paid media focus in the world of subscription search - is straightforwardly a premium version of Google. It's one of many satellite brands with which Google has opted to euphemistically "work together commercially".

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WHAT ACTUALLY IS A PREMIUM VERSION OF GOOGLE SEARCH?

Good question. To answer it, we first need to establish what Google Search is. Google Search has always been touted as a discovery mechanism, but it's really a profit-making data-mining system which serves:

• First, the agenda of surveillance capitalism and Google's own commercial interests.
• Second, the United States Government, its intelligence agencies, and its propaganda machine.
• Third, advertisers.
• Fourth, spammers.
• Fifth, corporate extortionists.
• [Continue your own bullet list of beneficiaries, including stalkers, content thieves, scammers, robots (see 6. Stop Pandering to Scrapers / Ditch SEO), etc.]
• Last, people who are actually seeking to discover something new on the Web.

Because the information-hungry web-surfer comes last in the long list of entities Google is serving, they typically go away empty handed. They're repetitively fed the same collection of Surveillance Valley platforms, propaganda factories and ecommerce outlets, which Google considers a safe bet, but which the web-surfer has come to consider tedious, biased, inauthentic, and obstructive of a "better Web", which is theoretically hidden beneath this wall of pre-selected drone-fodder. I say "theoretically", because these days there's barely anything left behind the wall - which is the main reason why paying for websearch is a waste of money, as we're about to see.

But in the premium version, the priority list does change. The web-surfer is now paying, and thus matters more to the search provider. More than the advertiser, for example, who drops out of the list altogether. However, Google still retains a primary allegiance to interests higher up the list. So the pathological commitment to surveillance remains, as does the censorship of anything the government and Google itself sees as a threat.

Google Premium, then, is a data-mining mechanism in which some of the running costs are met by the user instead of an advertiser, and the operator thus has more incentive to appease the user. However, the operator's own agenda, along with its priority allegiance to the US authorities, remains unchanged. Additionally, the user, as opposed to an advertiser, is now funding or financially facilitating unethical facets of websearch which can or will ultimately harm them - such as "AI" plunder and distributed content theft, corporate extortion, etc. And whilst a lot of people using Kagi think they're "de-Googling", all they're really doing is consolidating Google's monopoly.

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YOU WOULDN'T SEARCH AN EMPTY DRAWER...

When invested publishers have ceased publishing and non-commercial sites are closing faster than they were opening in the 1990s, it's no longer a question of how you search. It's a question of what even remains to be found.

Since 2022, link-rot has soared to a previously unthinkable high. A new era of "AI" theft and bandwidth abuse has created an irresistible disincentive for non-commercial publishers to continue. We're left with a cultural desert, and a clutch of cybertech giants who not only want us to endlessly trudge the barren sands for their benefit, but now, also, to pay to do it.

Don't pay. It's a con.

We have to remember that the traditional search engine market is still a monopoly, controlled, propagandised and heavily censored by Google. And when I say controlled, I don't merely mean that Google indexes and crawls the pages that appear in the results. Microsoft does that too. As do smaller engines like Mojeek, and even smaller engines like Marginalia. But Google still has sufficient market share to dictate terms to publishers, and the vast majority of publishers adhere to Google's terms. It's no exaggeration to say that Google has decided what publishers write about, and how they write and present it, since the 2000s.

"BUT THE SMALL WEB THO"

The most powerful argument in favour of paid search is that it incorporates Small Web and Indieweb discovery features. This, say the shills and the mugs they've managed to hoodwink, puts authentic content back within reach.

However, the Small Web is... Well, small. And it's riddled with paid propagandists, just like the mainstream Web. It also lacks diversity, tending as it does to concentrate on tech subjects, retro computing and similar, and insular self-promotion - posts about webrings and the like. Either that or rants about "Enshittification", many of which are a front for corporate propaganda, and which, even when presented without the corporate-serving inserts, quickly become tiringly repetitive. Once you've read ten articles from the Small Web and Indieweb, you've read them all. And I can save you even bothering to do that. Here's "Indieweb" 2025 in a nutshell...

Hey, I'm this little guy - just like you. And yeah okay so I'm actually an LLM Developer and I live in Surveillance Valley and I have a longrunning association with Google.

But let's ignore all that 'cos I like old computers and superficial punk, and I build indieweb backends with Golang*, so I'm really very indie.

* No mentally-sound person outside the Google satelliterati would build anything with Golang.

...And yeah so I remember the old days blah blah, and wasn't it great? And don't you just hate Facebook? And aren't Trump and Musk (but no other corporatocratic fucker) a pair of great big Nazis? And isn't bad AI just ruining it for AI's good guys? And crypto ponzi coin is sooo terrible for the environment [REDACTED: but let's not say the same about "AI", which is worse, sssshhhhh, 'cos unregulated money is a threat to the establishment, sssshhhhh, but "AI" just makes the elite richer at plebs' expense, which is fine, sssshhhh.]

So anyhoo, it doesn't have to be like this!

Why don't we all just forget about "AI" and make small websites like we did in the old days, and put all our best content on them. And I'm sure that if we make a webring (but hey! - no HTTP sites allowed, 'cos how can my corporate associates gatekeep the ring unless it's HTTPS?) at least ten people will read our sites. And you shouldn't mind getting fewer than eleven visitors, 'cos you are after all only a pleb, and a small audience is still a beautiful audience. And if we pray hard enough, Big Brother will not steal our work and sell it to the talentless, barely conscious dipshits who massively outrank us in the search results, and we'll all live happily every after. - A Techshill

Sound familiar?

There's also, of course, the fact that, because small indie sites tend to link to each other, search engines only have a limited role in the environment's discovery regime anyway. And you don't have to pay to search non-commercial sites. Marginalia, the resource that popularised this trend before anyone had heard of Kagi, does it for free.

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WHICH LEAVES...

So what are you left with after you've written off small/indie as a can of fizzy water? Where's the oasis? There isn't one. Paid search is subject to the same propagandism and censorship as subscription-free search. It's the same crap in a different order. A mind-boggling number of non-commercial sites have shut down since 2022. Whilst simultaneously, the genuinely independent (i.e. not funded by the preds) invested publishers have disappeared behind paywalls. So even if a search engine actually wanted to serve something other than the same crap, there's nothing left in the cupboard.

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IN SUMMARY

• Paid websearch spies on you, just like every other Silicon Valley product. There has not yet been one Silicon Valley cybertech brand whose claim to protect privacy turned out to be true. Google made the claim. Facebook made the claim. Microsoft made the claim. Brave made the claim. Mozilla made the claim. Neeva made the claim shortly before flogging off its entire PII vault to surveillance giant Snowflake. Aside from violating consent, spying on the public, grooming kids and sneaking cameras into toilets, bullshit is the only business this bunch of snooping-obsessed abnormals know.
• Paid search results are censored to the hilt, because they're drawn from pre-censored indexes. And they still favour Silicon Valley's irrepressible array of platforms and the usual pocketlined spin mills. Why, indeed, wouldn't they? It's not like Kagi is some fiercely independent band of Indian tech prodigies on a mission to dig back at the man. It's the same NSA-affiliated gang, from the same place as always. A Google-backed, Silicon Valley "startup", fronted either by literal Google staff or a serial Big Tech sellout, shilled by Doctorow and other Google agendists, and squirting the Big G's copious promo budget up the wall like a clown with a water pistol.
• "No ads" should mean impartial results only. But in Kagi's case it means an endless series of paid media sites and Google-bankrolled propaganda factories. Which makes paid search's "no ads" claim bullshit too. Sites like Tech Radar are one long ad with no discernible journalism in between. If you put Tech Radar in your results, you've served an ad. End of. And subscription search engine results are crawling with these Big-Tech-partnered advertorial dens.
• Paid search's privacy claims are pure fiction. Kagi says it doesn't store usage data, yet it must necessarily know precisely how many queries you've run in order to determine whether you've exceeded your subscription plan limit. Declarations along the lines of "We closely monitor this data but we go to the trouble of hiding the rest from ourselves" are obviously not something an intelligent being can take seriously...

There is one reason why no one heard of kagi.ai or donna.gg, or any other early Kagi venture, but kagi.com is substantially known. That reason is Google.

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SCRUBBED

The WWW is well advanced in its transition to an uninterrupted slick of projectile bot-vomit gated behind [n] billion "Making Sure You're Not a Bot" screens - each one of which will ultimately be impenetrable to anything but an "AI assistant". Paying a Google-backed Silicon Valley exit-strategist twenty-five dollars a month for a search engine will not turn that into satisfaction.

Same shit in a different order. Ultimately, subscription search is Silicon Valley promoting Silicon Valley's interests.

You can't uncensor input - only output. So if Google and Microsoft pre-censor the input to proxy engines like Kagi, Startpage, Gibiru, DuckDuckGo, Qwant, etc. - which they do - there's no way to recover the missing information.

Search any genuine threat to central control or the global surveillance agenda, and you won't find the actual thing. You'll only find the propaganda machine telling you what to think about the thing. It doesn't matter how many rungs of Google's premium ladder you climb. That is not going to change.

We're not necessarily talking about hyper-banned conspiracy theorists here. Even "smartphone phobia" (fear of smartphones and their strangulation of privacy and liberty) is rigorously scrubbed from the results, then replaced with the exact opposite - nomophobia (addiction to smartphones). If you have the imagination to think up totally innocent search queries that just happen to be a huge threat to the Big Brother agenda, it will take you just minutes to prove how censored ALL Silicon Valley search facilities are.

The most common independent assessment of subscription websearch (independent as in "not from a sockpuppet or incentivised party") is:

"It's better than Google, but I don't know if I'd describe the results as great."

In response to that, let's first remember that Google is not a charity, and it would never give a real competitor the means to beat it at its own game.

Kagi, we can thus be assured, is a straightforward extension of Google. Exactly like Mozilla. Exactly like Let's Encrypt. Except that in proven Big Tech sellout and exit strategist Vlad Prevolac, Kagi has a different league of clown fronting the show. Indeed, the very notion that someone this socially incompetent could have masterminded the impossible feat of creating "Google Premium" without a collaboration deal, is alone proof that Kagi is Google in a flat cap. Shaking a collecting tin at the mug it's gonna hit up with marginally less duff search results.

The world should have learned from the story of Neeva - which was literally staffed by Google - that these Silicon Valley based "Google-results-but-just-sufficiently-improved-to-persude-gullibles-to-pay-rent" machines are nothing but a predictable bid, by Google, to fight the unsustainability of a catastrophic content-drain. They are, if you like, Google's own acknowledgement that when advertising no longer pays the bills, you have to put up a paywall. And via Kagi, Google continues testing the concept of paywalliing the dregs of the WWW that haven't already been paywalled by the publishers themselves. Only a true mug is going to foot that rent.

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CULTURAL WASTELAND

The World Wide Web has become a cultural wasteland. It's a testament to the dire state of the landscape that sites written by dudes who think the world is flat and that Hitler was a great guy, have acquired a bizarre "relief value". That it would require a visit to an obnoxious, ignorant, demented, sexist, racist, ravingly antisemitic incel to find anything at all that you can trust not to have spewed from the jaws of Google, is a shocking indictment on the grip that the corporatocracy has asserted over information control.

This is extremely dangerous. In a healthy society, you cannot have a key information resource that is so extensively censored and repetitive of official propaganda to the exclusion of all else, that the conspiracy world's most definitive lunatics begin to gain a vote of authenticity. Which is exactly what they're now doing.

The solution is not to pay rent to a search engine to feed you more of the same. It's to get out of this cultural wasteland altogether. Spend more time offline. Take the sourcing of quality information more seriously than glibly hammering keywords into an HTML input box, then sending them to a government-affiliated corporation with no incentive at all to develop your mind for the purpose of anything other than servitude.

Whether or not you pay them rent, search engines are middlemen. You're not going directly to the enthusiast, or the activist, or the researcher. You're going to a gatekeeper. It's like visiting a library where, instead of simply walking round, identifying books that interest you by section and perusal, and then reading them, you're greeted by a government official standing at the door...

"Stop right there! No need to go in. Tell me what you want, and I will interpret what you mean, and bring you a limited selection of books that the government deems appropriate... What's that you say? The Diary of a Freeman on the Land?... Hmm, don't seem to be able to find that. Here's a really nice substitute called Pay Your Council Tax or Go to Jail by Birmingham City Council. Only a leaflet, obviously, but it's the best I can do at the moment...

Oh, you don't want that? How strange. Okay, let me find you something else. Go on. Name ya title. Anything you like... Errrr, Nuclear Weapons Do Not Work and They Are Only a Scam to Keep the Public in Fear While the Government Steals Tax and Wages Unnecessary Wars for Economic Gain?... Nah, no one's ever said that let alone written it. What about We Should Never Have Stopped at Iraq by GW Bush and Tony Blair?..."

Obviously, depending on your demeanour, you would either push the annoying clot out of the way and go in, or divert to another library. The WWW has conditioned us not to do that. It's conditioned us to allow the government official at the library door to decide and determine what we read. And of course, as authors steadily realise that there is no point in even writing The Diary of a Freeman on the Land if everyone who wants it is instead force-fed Pay Your Council Tax or Go To Jail, they stop producing. Which is precisely the outcome we've seen on the Web.

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As time progresses, the public will increasingly realise that whether or not nuclear weapons can do anything more than make an empty clank on a military base roof, Silicon Valley search engines categorically cannot find content that is no longer there to be found. And paying them rent does not alter that hard scientific fact.