I’ve recently started paying for unlimited searches over on Kagi, and I’m very happy with the results so far. I’d gladly pay if it meant less search cruft and higher result quality, but sadly Google’s just been going downhill for quite a while now.
Its a big black box with an unquantifiable improvement in quality, and I have no particular inclination to sign of for yet another subscription service. Particularly when I already watch my existing services creep up in price year after year.
That’s before I even get into shit like standard utilities. My electricity bill last month was $500, almost entirely based on the Texas AC bill. Bro, who has another $10/mo to spend on Newoogle when I’m maxed out just keeping the lights on?
Electric companies need to be taken to task it’s getting stupid. Every year they whine about how the infrastructure can’t handle our load and tell us to sweat it out during the hottest part of the day. Then, they raise the prices with the excuse of fixing it all and never do. It’s fucking criminal
Electric companies need to be taken to task it’s getting stupid.
They’ll never be taken to task, because the profits they generate go back into the political system that made them into a cartel to begin with. And efforts to break up the cartel often result in an increased dedication to organizing and opposing anti-trust practices. Its a system that Nassim Taleb might describe as “anti-fragile”.
I truly believe we can get there eventually if we just keep trying. The world is better off without us so it’s really a win/win no matter what happens lol
It’s unquantifiable, yes, possibly even placebo at times, but I think of it as paying for the features on top of search. I particularly find being able to create and adopt a search “lens” / focus and the ability to (de)prioritise domains very useful for my situation and needs.
That being said, I totally agree with your sentiment. I also only have limited subscriptions I can practically maintain, and I feel like this one’s earned it’s place well enough. To each their own I guess.
Is a meme. Google would kill their business model if they did this. Their whole model is to collect data from user searches and then make money off it.
I’m pretty sure they get more money from people freely giving them data using a lot of their services (maps, search) than they’d get if they gatekept searching with a, subscription that people opted out of.
They’re already working on this shit. I can’t get them to stop spamming me that my storage is almost full. I’m like, hmm, 80% full after using it for fifteen years, that means by math I’ve got at least three more years of storage left. Oh wait, if I take my videos down to local storage it goes up to six or seven years left.
I might be the odd person out here, but if Google offered a premium sub service that did 0 data collection and I never got served a thing by ad sense, I’d pay for it.
My thought is that with data collection and advertising you become the product that is being sold. I’d rather buy a product than be a product.
EDIT: Not just search, but a sub for all Google products I use.
Being open to subscription fees to remove data collection and ads after Google’s search engine became the trashiest, least useful search engine out there. pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/
I personally find a lot of Google’s services valuable to use and like them. You may hate Google search, but you can see at the bottom of my original post that I would sub for all Google services, not search specifically.
All services that operate have to be funded in some way. Right now for Google services that it’s done through collecting user data and selling it to advertisers.
I would prefer to pay a fee to fund those services I use if it meant my data was not collected and I was not served ads.
I personally find it more unhinged to think that everything online is somehow magically cost free to provide. Engineers have to code and deploy it, servers have to be purchased, electricity has to be generated, etc. If you have a service online that is “free”, you need to ask where the money comes from to do all of those things. Chances are, it’s from your data being sold and privacy reduced.
Your math doesn’t make sense. In 2022 Google had $253B in annual ad revenue. Most estimates that I find have Google services users at 1 Billion+ on the low end. The Ad Revenue per User would be less than $25 a month.
That is an amount that I would pay for all the services I use. I already pay for YouTube premium which is more than half that cost.
It’s not for everyone. There are many categories of people; those who couldn’t afford a monthly fee, those that would rather get a free service for data collection and ads even if they could afford it, and those of us that would happily pay for services if the data collection and ads went away.
There is an argument that the services would be less valuable if data weren’t collected to build the quality of results, like maps data and what not. I would argue that enough people would prefer to go the ad supported route to make that argument moot though.
More than half of their claimed user accounts are inactive. So many in fact that they’re starting to auto-delete inactive accounts. The only way they’d agree to such an idea is if it were far, far more expensive.
I do not trust Google to honor their word. They absolutely would charge and find a way to sell your data. They would probably word it in such a way that would make it seem like all is good.
Yeah, I agree with you there. I wouldn’t pay Google for privacy unless they could provide some pretty convincing evidence that they are not tracking and selling my information. That might not even be possible, though. It’s tough to prove a negative.
I suppose that what I mean is that I’d be willing to pay Google $15/month to not track me in any way if they could figure out a way to convince me that they truly are not tracking me. I would need some real assurances, though, not just “we’re not tracking you, we promise!” I have no idea how they can provide that kind of assurance, though.
I’m not a google shill. I’m just someone who is trying to have a conversation about this. It seems that, right now, the only way to be mostly sure that you’re not being tracked is to use self-hosted services and, even then, you’d need to examine the source code or trust the FOSS community to keep tabs on things.
True, and even while self-hosting I guess you would probably be tracked in some way as much as anybody can, by the host or by your ISP if real-self-host.
Knowing Google, they’d charge you and still track you. Also, if YouTube Red is any indication, they’d probably charge closer to $150. You can get a search engine that doesn’t track you or have ads called Kagi, for $10 per month.
I’m a subscriber here. Search works great. Better than google for my use cases. Maps are still rough. AI integrations are good, better than free providers like bing.
I recommend Kagi for anyone with enough technical expertise to figure out how to set their search providers. It’s hard to do this on mobile unfortunately.
I just switched all my browsers to use kagi about 2 weeks ago. On my Android phone, all I had to do was open chrome’s settings, click search engine, and I could change it right there. :)
Oh, they’d be happy to offer you that for $4.99/mo. Then, after a year or so, they’d inject some preferred provider search results, and bump the ad-free tier to $9.99 mo. The $4.99 tier would be unlimited search, but with ads. Want to block bullshitty SEO sites? Extra $2.99.
I use ad blockers but it isn’t lost on me that services I use cost money to operate. That money is provided by selling data and ad clicks.
Because of ad blockers trying to cut off the revenue source we end up with a battle between companies and users where the most popular browser on the planet is adding things like this - arstechnica.com/…/googles-web-integrity-api-sound…
I’d much rather provide the revenue for the services I find valuable and not have a ton of middleware enforcing web drm to ensure I’m advertised to.
That money is provided by selling data and ad clicks.
The ROI on selling bulk data and forwarding ads vastly outweighs whatever change you’re dropping into the meter. Even if you do pay for a premium service, your data is still going to get collected and you’re still going to look at ads, because why would Google just pass up on that money?
You’ll have the data collection and ads obfuscated, through some combination of variant interfaces and marketing language and dense, unreadable EULAs. But its going to happen no matter how much you pay, because its cheaper to lie to you than to forgo this data collection.
I’d much rather provide the revenue for the services I find valuable and not have a ton of middleware enforcing web drm to ensure I’m advertised to.
But that’s just it. We’re not going towards an either/or model. We’re going to a both model.
You seem to be under the impression that I think it is moving in the direction I’d like it to. I do not think that. I said that if it were offered to have a paid service I would prefer it.
Looking at calculated stats from 2016 which admittedly are out of date showed an ARPU of $6.70 a quarter. Assuming that has gone up by 10x and it’s $70 per quarter I think a paid service is well within the realm of possibility.
As someone who no doubt is in the minority of users, I don’t think having a paid option for those that would use it would have a big impact on the bottom line. Most people would pile onto the free service and let Google suck up all the data they want. For people like myself that don’t click on ads intentionally, they’d probably make more money off of me individually by taking my money directly.
Looking at calculated stats from 2016 which admittedly are out of date showed an ARPU of $6.70 a quarter. Assuming that has gone up by 10x and it’s $70 per quarter I think a paid service is well within the realm of possibility.
That’s fine. But consider how the Netflix and Amazon model are following Hulu towards “ad supported” media, despite already being a paid-for service.
I don’t think there’s a threshold at which data providers will sincerely exempt the individual from surveillance and ads. Even if its something you’re offered, all you’re purchasing is deception. You’ll still get your data siphoned surreptitiously. And you’ll still get promos and teasers and native ads that the streaming service gets paid to show you.
I’m arguing that add blockers are causing companies like Google to fight ad blockers. They aggressively mine data because it’s profitable to target ads with it.
If millions of people didn’t use ad blockers there wouldn’t be much of a reason for them to spend engineering dollars on Web Identity DRM tools to attempt to prevent changes to web pages by blockers.
The irony being that the internet advertising ecosystem is collapsing. Advertisers are understanding that the ROI for the marketing dollar is being thwarted by poor data collecting algorithms and adblockers.
A white page with black text. On the top left is the Google logo. Underneath is text reading:
"UH OH!
“You’ve used all 75 of your daily free searches!. You’re currently using Google Lite for infinite searches, please consider subscribing to Google Premium.”
On the right side is a digital drawing of a bulldog standing like a human with its right forepaw on its hip and its left forepaw holding a pair of binoculars to its eyes. Underneath the dog is text reading:
“Get one month of Google Premium for $14.99 AUD!”
[I am a human, if I’ve made a mistake please let me know. Please consider providing alt-text for ease of use. Thank you. 💜 We have a community! If you wish for us to transcribe something, want to help improve ease of use here on Lemmy, or just want to hang out with us, join us at !lemmy_scribes!]
Google is not a search engine. It’s an advertising service. Their whole business model revolves around a critical mass of eyeballs, which flock to free services. This will never happen for the average user.
Ostensibly yeah, the product being offered is a search engine. Realistically, the product being offered is a combination of your data, and your eyes/attention.
This is literally how their search API works. Except the limit is more like 25 queries a day and the price would be closer to $40/mo for average user’s usage.
Just to clarify. The API pricing is 100 requests per day for free and $5 for every 1000 requests over that. But, the API is limited to 10 items per request. Their own UI provides up to 100 results per page (the setting seems to be hidden now, but is still active for users who set it before), which would require multiple requests to match, plus an image and/or video carousels each of which require an additional query, opening images tab preloads 50 images just to fill the screen, which is 4 more requests minimum for any image search, and, given how clicking each image also loads a bunch of related images, the estimate of 4 requests per search is very conservative. I use search on average about 80 times a day, and, doing the math, it would cost me on average $33.48 per month to do my searches using their API instead of using the free and unlimited official UI. This is ridiculous. And then twitter and reddit did exactly the same thing, too.
If you say you’d pay for a search engine. Oof. Guys we used to just link useful things at the end of our blog posts and on our myspace pages. Then search engines came in and we didn’t have to. Then they killed the SEO placement of blogs. Now you can’t find anything useful unless you try their AI. The whole business model is convincing us we need them while they make the internet less efficient to scroll through.
There were a ton of search engines in the 90s around the same time Geocities was released. AskJeeves was probably the most popular, but there was Altavista, Lycos, Dogpile, Yahoo… Shit, Google came out in 97, which was only a few years after Geocities.
When I had my Geocities website, I used Webcrawler as my preferred search engine. Cute spider and spiderweb iso/logo. Then came Altavista (altavista.digital.com, it was at first) and I switched. It brought more and better results. Somehow I never liked Lycos. And Yahoo, the first years, was a categorised catalogue/guide, kinda curated, and you had to submit a site to be considered to be added. You had to choose under which category (and subcategory, quite often) it should be listed. Also, at first, it wasn’t Yahoo.com, it was buried in some .edu (or .ac, I don’t quite recall) URL.
Haha, I’m too young to really have lived it, I’m only 26 so… I did experience the start of Facebook and Twitter. I’m very glad people who did live through it are expanding on it.
Yeah it sounds like you got online right when Web 2.0 was starting to really kick off. Back before then we did have search functions, though they were pretty primitive compared to what they’ve become now (and also before they went to shit with excessive SEO and advertising). Web 2.0 really marked the emphasis towards UX design and social network functionality within web sites/design, though people had links on their personal pages well before all that.
It sounds like what the picture is making fun of, already materialized in this kagi search engine. Paying for a search just is a about face from what the Internet was designed to be. You could argue everything is this way, but I’d then argue consumers are bigger pushovers now.
SearX/SearXNG is a free and open source, highly customizable, and self-hostable meta search engine. SearX instances act as a middle man, they query other search engines for you, stripping all their spyware ad crap and never having your connection touch their servers. Of course you have to trust the SearX instance host with your query information, but again if you are that paranoid just self host.
I personally also trust some foss loving sysadmin that host social services for free out of alturism, who also accepts hosting donations, with my info over Google/Alphabet any day.
Heres a list of all public searx instances, I personally prefer to use paulgo.ioAll SearX instances are configured different to index different engines. If one doesn’t seem to give good results try a few others.
Did I mention it has bangs like duckduckgo? If you really need google like for maps and buisness info just use !!g in the query
search.marginalia.nu is a completely novel search engine written and hosted by one dude that aims to prioritize indexing lighter websites little to no javascript as these tend to be personal websites and homepages that have poor SEO and the big search engines won’t index well. If you remember the internet of the early 2000s and want a nostalgia trip this ones for you
Finally, YaCy is another completely novel search engine that uses p2p technology to power a big webcrawler which prioritizes indexes based off user queries and feedback. Everyone can download yacy and devote a bit of their computing power to help out a collective search engine. Companies can also download yacy and use it to index their private intranets. They have a public instance available through a web portal. Its not a great search engine for what most people want, which is quick and relevant information within the first few clicks. But it is an interesting use of technology and what a true honest-to-god community-operated search engine would look like untainted by SEO scores.
I hope this has been informative to those who believe theres only a few options to pick from, I hate to be the ‘bhut achthually’ guy but know these options are so unknown to most people.
The problem with all those search providers is: Someone still has to pay for infrastructure. You can either donate/pay for the service or accept ads and tracking.
(I know that YaCy works a bit differently, but honestly even though I really like the idea of the system: This “novel” search engine is almost 20 years old now and never really worked very good.)
Very true, there always being a cost somewhere is a general rule for all services in general. Its the reality of computer infrastructure that theres gotta be a computer/server somewhere eating bandwidth and energy, and someone with enough time + technical knowledge to maintain them. Those cost need to be offset either through donation or profit, or the service provider just has to eat the expenses and pay out of pocket. ‘no cost actually’ is in reference to the end users directly paying for something with direct money or collected private info sold to ad companies. In many public hosting instances for open source services most active users don’t pay or donate at all and get to use the service without their info being sold. In these cases the expense is split between a few donations from better off charitable users and the rest is out of pocket from the sysadmin who most likely has a real job that pays well enough they can eat the hosting fees and not worry about it.
I’m not sure if this is really feasible (even though I’d be happy to see a working libre search engine). The problem I see is that a search engine is incredibly expensive to run, which makes it hard to maintain servers on a donation model.
I understand why you would pay and can respect it. But access to an organized and searchable internet is something closer to a right than a privilege, in my mind.
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