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.
This will never happen for the average user.
Shareholders have different plans for infinite growth.
If anyone ever figures out how to charge people service fees in the afterlife … there will be service fees in the afterlife
As the saying goes- if the service is free, you’re not the customer.
Eh, they’re turning Youtube into that and yet people buy premium so I would be careful to make any such predictions.
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.
… do you think MySpace came before search engines?
Replace Myspace with Geocities and it’s broadly correct of my experience in 90s internet.
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.
You just dated the hell out of yourself, but also showed how young you are at the same time.
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.
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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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I’m not sure you you understand how Google makes money…which would tell you why this would never happen.
I thought I understood how Twitter made money
Twitter didn’t make money though.
I’m still wondering how they valued it at $44 billion before the purchase.
Pretty much https://kagi.com/ but outrageous
Kagi is like google was 10 years ago though, useable and useful, while Google has morphed an SEO trashcan. I wouldn’t pay them any amount for current quality
Don’t give them ideas lol
Ai uses so much energy, it’s not impossible
Image Transcription:
A white page with black text. On the top left is the Google logo. Underneath is text reading:
"UH OH!
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“Get one month of Google Premium for $14.99 AUD!”
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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.
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?
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.
I’d pay for google if they didn’t steal my data.
Bluff called
