That would be equivalent to demonetizing the entire web. Free content would win out over paid content regardless of quality. As the old adage goes, "when you're getting something for free, you're the product being sold." Only sites making money by, shall we say, "indirect" means would be able to survive. A search engine which prioritizes free content over paid would become nothing but a propaganda engine.

I think I should at least be able to see even a subset of the content that caused the item to be returned in the search result, though. If I try to navigate away or see more content, sure, make me log in. But, if I search something, click on a Twitter/Facebook/Linkedin result, I should at least be able to see something.

The search --> visit --> immediate redirect to login results should be de-ranked.

“Free content would win out over paid content regardless of quality” this doesn’t follow unless we assume the most extreme implementation, the openness of the content is just one factor of many that should count in the contents favor. Further it assumes the only non-shady way to monetize content is put it behind a login which is not true.

> Free content would win out over paid content regardless of quality.

Quality has never been synonymous with monetization for as long as I can remember. The primary driver of low quality or harmful content is greed. Guess what fuels the most greed in modern society?

> A search engine which prioritizes free content over paid would become nothing but a propaganda engine.

Are you suggesting that including Twitter in search results would mitigate propaganda?

>>> nothing but a propaganda engine

And that's different from Google, how?

A search engine which prioritizes free content, reviewed intelligently, is curation, and not Goodharted gotcha games. If you can crawl the web and index sites with human level content curation, with a reasonably performant scaffolding, you can prevent SEO style exploitation, and use natural language rules like "does this content contain text attempting to game the ranking of a site or violate policy XYZ?"

Most AIs use bing and google, so the best you can get is a curated list from the already censored and politically filtered results from those sources, funneling commercial traffic toward the highest paying adtech customers - it's just refined, ultra-pure SEO results, unless they use their own index and crawler.

I'd almost rather have a naive raw index that can be interacted with, but custom indices, like xAI and Kagi, are definitely superior to Google and Bing. Google's a dumpster fire and Bing's a tawdry knockoff, and they're both interested in gaming the surveillance data and extracting as much money as possible from their adtech customers.

Paying for a service incentivizes the quality of that service. If that service is honest curation of and effective web search with custom indices and crawlers, then the free and paid distinction don't matter - the highest quality based on the curation criteria is what gets a site surfaced. I want my search engine to return McMaster Carr over Temu or Amazon, or a local flower shop over some corporate slop. Google doesn't get paid by meeting my expectations, it gets paid by exploiting my attention and extracting fractions of profit from commercial interactions, and makes more money by pushing me into business with companies that I'd otherwise want nothing to do with.

Demonetizing the entire web - dismantling the surveillance adtech regime - sounds like an absolute utopic victory to me.