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.
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I wonder what happens when the time finally comes and they realize infinite growth is impossible. Black Friday II?
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.
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.
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It’s an advertising service, the way they serve ads is through attracting people to free searches.
It’s much like how a magazine is actually an ad service, but you can open a magazine to any random page and have a chance of not seeing an ad.
Or like how over the air television is actually an ad service, but you have a chance of turning it on at any random moment and not seeing an ad.
He’s not describing how Google attracts YOU. He’s taking about what Google actually sells, which is ads.
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.
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.
Webrings ftw
Yahoo Directory is the OG
Was altavista really a search engine?
Lycos
AskJeeves
Dogpile. Webcrawler. Gopher.
I was always partial to hotbot
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Technically yes, but there were also a ton more, including Google.
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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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Care to explain? Or you’re only capable of talking shit?
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.
Everyone pays for search. You do it through attention/data traded to advertisers or currency.
If Kagi is functionally better than Google and respects my privacy, I would not mind paying for it.
No, actually.
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.io All 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.)
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For now. Soon enough there will be ads and so on in the name if increasing profits.
Then stop paying and go somewhere else ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Your purchase is monumentally stupid and he’s laughing at that
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Yet it would be interesting to hear, why this shocks you so much. :)
Is it because you don’t think search engines are a service worth paying for or because Google, Bing, DDG … are free?
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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.
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.
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.
They only changed that about a week ago, it used to be $10/1000 queries. Not that I’m complaining - I’m on that tier!
Yeah. i have seen I think in their FAQ that plan and confused me a bit. Moving from DDG to Kagi
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!]
Good human
Thank you, fellow human 🤖
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You’re doing a great work.
Thank you!
Thank you :)
You’re welcome :)
Good bot
Beep boop
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.
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.
It’s very easy on Android
It’s terrible on iOS. There’s no real way to do it other than…installing a new browser.
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. :)
s/mobile/ios/ above then I suppose :/
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.
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.
Are you making the argument that ad blocking software is the reason for companies aggressively mining user data?
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.
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, 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.
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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.
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I would definitely use the account my work pays for. Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that’s why I search on company time.
You know your employer can do a takeout on your gsuite search history, right?
My employer called me the other day to ask me about a purchase I made online using my company laptop the day before. They’re always watching.
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.
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.
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?
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. https://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.
Maps is the only service they have that isn’t bested by something else.
They’re not making pennies on that data.
To pay vs letting them slurp up your data you’d be paying Alphabet thousands a year. It will never happen, but sure. It’s a nice fantasy.
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’d pay for google if they didn’t steal my data.
Bluff called
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For whatever reason, mentioning Kagi brings downvotes.
Because, why would anyone pay money to Google for Kagi? Duh!
Edit edit: y’all are just oh my goodness! le heckin internets for everyone!!
Yeah that’s the dillema with many freemium services. I would pay for them if it didn’t instantly deanonymize me.
Kagi doesn’t.
How so?
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’m still wondering how they valued it at $44 billion before the purchase.
Elon Musk cut them a check for that price.
I think you understood, but Elon didn’t 🤣
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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.
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DuckDuckGo is not really much better. And it uses Bing as a backend. Gone are the days of reliable search engines.
Or DuckDuckGo, ecosia, bing, askjeeves, nexislexis, Qwant, altavista…
altavista
wow, I had no idea it still existed! I don’t think I’ve used it since it was altavista.digital.com
edit: it doesn’t, it’s just yahoo search now
I thought the same about askjeeves, can’t believe it made it this long
Damn! This talk of forgotten search engines made me realise that dogpile.com is still alive! I dimly recall using it before Google’s rise to power.
What happened to lycos?
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What a blast from the past. I remember using Lycos in my school’s computer room. That was almost 25 years ago.
Lycos Mail was the very first example of email I ever saw. It blew my mind when I was a small kid.
DuckDuckGo is Bing under the hood.
I use its app and search service and it consistently outputs better and faster than google.
Although I don’t use it personally I used google for a very short time in a professional setting, with high speed internet access, and the results and speed of delivery was trash when compared.
In another thread, a lemming mentioned they have improved on the privacy provided, after renegotiating with Microsoft.
I’ve had the exact opposite experience.
Not doubting your word. How could we compare experiences in a somewhat reliable way?
Can’t we just shout at each other instead like civilized people?
Why? Shouting is painful to hear and a waste of energy.
ever try the duckduckgo app? I didn’t realize it existed until now.
II’m usually on firefox with adblocker, and just use duck as my default search, so the app seems unnecessary. willing to try it out tho
Yeah, it’s just a private browser. I use it along with Firefox.
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DuckDuckGo is just Bing.
Everyone here is saying this. Using Bing as an engine while maintaining peivacy doesn’t seem as much of a problem to me. Can you explain why pointing out that bing being under the hood is seen as a negative?
I assume because Bing gives the exact same spam results as Google. All of the seatch engines kinda suck nowadays.
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DDG is a search engine without its own search engine.
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SearXNG enthusiasts
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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.
