As someone who has been architecting a paid “deep search” tool for a couple of years now ( my approach is trying to enable very deep search flexibility, like you can grip files on your hard drive, but balancing that against usability at internet scale is very hard ) I have been on board with the idea the “search is valuable enough to end users that they will pay” for awhile. The issue isn’t value, it’s marketing it successfully enough to gather users at a rate that covers costs. I haven’t launched my project even in private alpha to anyone because it still costs too much per search, for other search engines it will cost less and hopefully we get a healthy ecosystem of search tools eventually.

Based on what I’m seeing in google search quality… their days of unquestioned dominance died a few years ago. The king is dead, the prince (bing) is on vacation somewhere, and the crown is up for grabs.