1y ago

UH OH!

168 comments

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.
- As the saying goes- if the service is free, you're not the customer.
- I'm pretty sure it's a search engine...
  
  Por que no los dos?
  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.
- yeah the days of Google search being king or long past over
- 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.
  
  Was altavista really a search engine?
- 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.

Actual Internet funeral

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
- Isn’t their pricing per month not per query?
  
  $5 for 300 queries. $10 unlimited.
  
  The cheapest plan also has query limits.
- How is it outrageous to pay for a product? There are obvious reasons and benefits. Go use a free one then. No need to bash a good product because you don’t want it.
  
  I never said Kagi is, I said Google would be if they applied the pricing model.
- I'm down for the concept, but the pricing on Kagi is also pretty steep. $5/month for 300 searches? $10 unlimited. I have no doubt there are serious costs involved in providing search, but for a layman like me it feels way more than it should be. Does google even make $120/user/year on search, or even $60?
  Anywho, I'd give it a go if it were cheaper, else, I'd rather be lightly advertised to on DuckDuckGo
  
  Eventually I will use the trial of it. I don't feel like I actually do that many searches, and most are me looking up Pokemons while I play the games. So 300 searches per month doesn't actually sound too bad, I can do my least important searches like my game ones on DDG.

Image Transcription:
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@lemmy.world!]

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.
- Free/Tracking you = $$
  Subscription/not tracking you = $$
  Both = $$$$
  See: youtube premium
- Lmao they would just lie about collecting information.
  
  im a american and this is simply the american way
- 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.
- Not quite there for non-tech folks, but the paid search engine Kagi immensely improved my search experience.
  https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/why-pay-for-search.html
  
  Absolutely love Kagi. The smol web, API, rss feeds, rank/block sites, it's an invaluable resource.
  I may use Google images once or twice a month, but I never Google anymore.
  
  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.
- 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.
- kagi.com basically offers this.
  their actual search results are generally better than google as well. probably because they don't have a financial incentive to push you towards ads.
- but why do that when there's options like using ecosia and uBlock Origin.
  
  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 - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrity-api-sounds-like-drm-for-the-web/
  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.
- I would 100% pay $15/month to use Google products without being tracked and sold.
  
  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, and suddenly they'd focus on giving you relevant search results, not relevant ads.
  But hey, try explaining this to the broke students who populate this place.
- I'd pay, but only if the actual search results were not just a bunch of adds. I want the search engine to be as useful as it was 10 or so years ago.
- 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.
- Haha funny guy.
- YaCy
- That's the most unhinged thing I've read in - well 5 minutes but it's still crazy
  
  What is unhinged about it?

I'd pay for google if they didn't steal my data.
- https://kagi.com
  
  Bluff called
- Yeah that's the dillema with many freemium services. I would pay for them if it didn't instantly deanonymize me.
  
  Kagi doesn’t.
- searxng/startpage
  
  Searxng is awesome
- I very specifically made a deal with the devil to trade my data for data on a vast array of subjects. That's one of the sacred covenants of the internet. Don't break the covenant, Google!

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 think you understood, but Elon didn't 🤣
- It's a great mystery that nobody knows of. Shhh, don't tell anyone!

Don't give them ideas lol
- Ai uses so much energy, it's not impossible

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.

DON'T GIVE THEM IDEAS!
- 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.

Fucking do it, I dare you.

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
  
  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.
- Best thing I paid for since fastmail.
- So all they'd need to get you to pay is to lower the current quality of search results and add a shop option to restore it for $10?

bro did you make that meme?

wait, what? is Google actually a paid service now or is this a meme./?
- 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.
- it will be when it gets bought by Musk

AOL and Lycos coming back from the gulag
- AskJeeves gang, where you at?
  
  HotBot was my jam

168 comments