Google Search hasn’t been revolutionary since 2008. Most everyone has all but caught up over a decade ago. The only thing GS has is a monopoly by being the default search. Outside of that, their service is just like all the others (and in some cases worse at returning results).

Well it still is, the web is open to be indexed.
Now paying for a service which has its own index sounds fine, but I personally don't trust this model if the code isn't open source as well (which kind of ties back into freely accessible information), though I can see it being hard to monetize if anyone can host their own version, unless the hardware infrastructure needed was really expensive

Could you tell me what you're on the fence about? I'm down to pay for a search engine to reduce my reliance on Google if it works well. DDG doesn't do great with technical searches all the time

I love the listicles feature. Not because I want to actually look at those results but because they're all stripped out of the main search. Doing product research is so much better without all those low-quality "top whatever 2023" lists that take up the first 3 pages of google lol

There are a lot of options: Bitcoin & Bitcoin lightning via opennode + Paypal, Venmo, iDeal, giropay, & stripe.

Personally I converted some XMR to BTC then paid with that (using a single-use wallet)