MetaGer search engine only available for a fee in the future

The privacy-friendly search engine MetaGer, operated by the non-profit organization Suma-ev, will no longer be available in its usual form with immediate effect. The ad-financed search, which has ensured the majority of revenue and thus the operation and further development of the service, is no longer possible.

"The reason is that Yahoo terminated our contracts unilaterally and without any notice on Monday. Upon request, we were only informed that Yahoo would no longer be operating the business in Germany," Suma-ev reported. This means not only the loss of all advertising revenue, but also the end of search results for ad-financed searches.

Plans to prevent dependency

Suma-ev was aware of its dependence on Yahoo and had already made plans to reduce this dependence – for example by using a paid search key. However, further plans to acquire its own advertising partners could no longer be realized due to the sudden termination.

Suma-ev remains in place and continues to sell keys for the search. The team wants to continue to work for the association on a voluntary basis to ensure that it can continue to operate. However, all employees had to be made redundant. "The plans to become bigger and one day be a good alternative to 'the big players' with our own index (or European index) have of course died with this termination by Yahoo," it says.

MetaGer is a meta search engine that was launched at the University of Hanover. It uses other search engines. Tokens can be purchased for ad-free use. 1000 tokens cost 10 euros, whereby one web search corresponds to around three tokens. It was also possible to send cash and an ID to the association to purchase the keys.

Several search engines are used for search queries, including Bing and Yahoo. The release of Microsoft's new Bing, which includes a version of OpenAI's GPT-4, had also driven up the cost of MetaGer, leading to a faster release of the paid metasearch.

(mack)