It is the interesting question of our times isn't it? I did the calculation for Blekko at one time and a couple of million paid subscribers could have floated the base search engine. It is hard to find people to subscribe to things on the internet though unless they are MMO games :-)
Gamify the search engine experience? Give people points for each distinct search query? Have a leaderboard? Have people compete on who can find the answers to questions the fastest using a search engine? Have quests of knowledge where people have to journey through the internet solving problems for other people using search engines to gain points? Sell people power ups during the competitions/quests that allow for them to more efficiently parse through many sources of information?
Idk, the search engine experience has remained the same for what I can see for a couple decades now. I'm not surprised people wouldn't want to pay for that. But if search engines could be combined with aspects of be a mmorpgs, I'd might pay for it, or at least sell my account after I racked up enough points for someone who wants it :P
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The core problem is that while you might be willing to pay a small amount for search results, advertisers will pay a huge amount for your personal info ( or equivalently, highly targeted ads).
Search ads do not get a significant boost from personal info. Display ads do get a significant boost.
Targeting companies would show up to try to buy info from Blekko all the time. We weren't interested on principle, and, they were only offering less than 1% of what we were making off of search ads.
The issue with search engines is that they tend to get very good by using clickthrough data, so the more you use something the better it gets. Indexing and ranking algorithms can only do so much.
The interesting question is that does Google own the click through data or does the user? Does Google exclusively own the fact that you clicked on the 4th link in Google leading to php.net when you searched for 'php'?
Or can the user or government get this data to alternate search engines for better competition just like they forced Microsoft to open up Office file formats and SMB protocol docs to their rivals?
If you remember the big deal about the optional Bing bar in IE uploading the search term and clicked URL in Google search results to Bing it looks like many people on here think Google exclusively owns the clickstream data, and it's not the users' to do what it wants.
This is the reason that a paid search engine won't do very well, just like a paid social network wouldn't, because both rely on a lot of people using it to seed it and a paywall will hurt.
