Why? There's nothing wrong with paying for something (including some news sites), and when I search for a topic I'm looking for something I can actually read. Knowing that a link will get me nowhere without the credit card is useful.

You’re paying them to rank and collect information from things on the web for you. People can’t subscribe to everything and it’s nice as a user of a search engine to know if it’s a requirement.

we really need a better way of paying for content. There's some attempts going around of browsers or extensions paying sites, but the ones i've seen felt kinda scammy.

i'd love some service where i can put in $20 a month, and it gets split up among the sites i've visited, with options to give bigger shares or exclude sites completely. probably not gonna happen for a while though, having to set up something to receive payments with is just too much trouble for the small personal blogs etc. that have the most interesting content.

Payments online are a giant nightmare pit because the US finance world is very very scared of sex work. As long as that doesn't get solved, I don't see easily accessible and distributed payments working in a way that doesn't involve hoops most folks don't want to jump through (i.e. sending in ID to some corp that will definitely leak it a week later or cryptocurrency).

Scroll used to basically do this, but then it was acquired by Twitter, lobotomized, and turned into a Twitter Blue feature. After that I gave up on it.

I'd use a service like that as long as this removes all advertising and third-party analytics from the site as well.

Honestly, I think a service like Kagi (together with their Orion browser) would be best suited to set up a service like this. I've been thinking for some time about exactly the idea you're proposing.

The interface could be so simple: a button in your browser you click to donate to the current open tab. That button turns into a pay button if you've opened a page that demands payment. And the page could specify how much it costs.

We would love to do this, and we are waiting for the right technology to do so!

Many top 10 searches are paywalled and a waste of time clicking on, this seems like exactly the sort of thing people want from a search engine?

It doesn't say anything about avoiding them. It's just indicating that they are (potentially) paywalled.

To a user willing to pay Kagi for a better search experience that may well be seen as a mark that those articles are more likely to be worth reading.

> help their users avoid them

Or draw attention to content that may be better?

Down the road I see a potential bundle / partnership :).