I wonder what happens when the time finally comes and they realize infinite growth is impossible. Black Friday II?
Karyoplasma 2 points 3 years ago
ininewcrow 1 point 3 years ago
If anyone ever figures out how to charge people service fees in the afterlife .... there will be service fees in the afterlife
FlyingSquid 13 points 3 years ago
As the saying goes- if the service is free, you're not the customer.
sturmblast 3 points 3 years ago
yeah the days of Google search being king or long past over
Destraight 0 points 3 years ago path: 0 4113830 4124206, hotness: undefined, score: 0, children: 1
Wogi 5 points 3 years ago
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.
Franzia 88 points 3 years ago
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.
Catoblepas 21 points 3 years ago
Replace Myspace with Geocities and it's broadly correct of my experience in 90s internet.
Steeve 13 points 3 years ago
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.
Senuf 6 points 3 years ago
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.
cyborganism 10 points 3 years ago
Webrings ftw
postmateDumbass 5 points 3 years ago
Yahoo Directory is the OG
MyNameIsIgglePiggle 7 points 3 years ago
Was altavista really a search engine?
bobs_monkey 4 points 3 years ago
Lycos
postmateDumbass 6 points 3 years ago
AskJeeves
devopspalmer 9 points 3 years ago
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.
bobs_monkey 18 points 3 years ago
You just dated the hell out of yourself, but also showed how young you are at the same time.
bobs_monkey 3 points 3 years ago
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.
SSUPII 71 points 3 years ago
Pretty much https://kagi.com/ but outrageous
MisterFrog 2 points 3 years ago
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
SSUPII 1 point 3 years ago
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.
Transcriptionist 56 points 3 years ago
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!]
loudWaterEnjoyer 11 points 3 years ago
Good human
Transcriptionist 2 points 3 years ago
Thank you, fellow human 🤖
testgoatpleaseignore 2 points 3 years ago path: 0 4115557 4121513 4141345 4170395, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0
Transcriptionist 2 points 3 years ago
Thank you!
pomodoro_longbreak 2 points 3 years ago
Thank you :)
Transcriptionist 2 points 3 years ago
You're welcome :)
JackFrostNCola -5 points 3 years ago
Good bot
Transcriptionist 15 points 3 years ago
Beep boop
Kentronix 54 points 3 years ago
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.
MaxVoltage 6 points 3 years ago
im a american and this is simply the american way
Anticorp 20 points 3 years ago
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.
Phoenix3875 18 points 3 years ago
Not quite there for non-tech folks, but the paid search engine Kagi immensely improved my search experience.
Cyberflunk 7 points 3 years ago path: 0 4126655 4131201 4134189, hotness: undefined, score: 7, children: 0
jaywalker1 3 points 3 years ago
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.
jaywalker1 2 points 3 years ago
It’s terrible on iOS. There’s no real way to do it other than…installing a new browser.
RememberTheApollo_ 14 points 3 years ago
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.
Vorticity 2 points 3 years ago
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.
Vorticity 1 point 3 years ago
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.
Cyberflunk 3 points 3 years ago path: 0 4126655 4127039 4134221, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 1
EuroNutellaMan 5 points 3 years ago
but why do that when there's options like using ecosia and uBlock Origin.
Kentronix 3 points 3 years ago
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/...
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.
Kentronix 1 point 3 years ago
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.
UnderpantsWeevil 1 point 3 years ago
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.
Kentronix 1 point 3 years ago
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.
where_am_i 4 points 3 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.
dangblingus 3 points 3 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.
Reygle 3 points 3 years ago
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/...
Kentronix 0 points 3 years ago
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.
TheRealCharlesEames 80 points 3 years ago path: 0 4109748 4110177, hotness: undefined, score: 80, children: 5
LegionEris 3 points 3 years ago
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!
DavidDoesLemmy 26 points 3 years ago
I thought I understood how Twitter made money
simplylemons 3 points 3 years ago
I'm still wondering how they valued it at $44 billion before the purchase.
UnderpantsWeevil 4 points 3 years ago
Elon Musk cut them a check for that price.
VinnieFarsheds 12 points 3 years ago
I think you understood, but Elon didn't 🤣
stefenauris 39 points 3 years ago
Don't give them ideas lol
drathvedro 26 points 3 years ago
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.
drathvedro 8 points 3 years ago
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.
Tammo-Korsai 9 points 3 years ago
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.
SpaceNoodle 2 points 3 years ago
DuckDuckGo is Bing under the hood.
qyron 1 point 3 years ago
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.
SpaceNoodle 1 point 3 years ago
I've had the exact opposite experience.
KreekyBonez 4 points 3 years ago
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
Tick_Dracy 1 point 3 years ago path: 0 4109695 4111425 4153380, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
SpaceNoodle -1 points 3 years ago
DuckDuckGo is just Bing.
TheFriar 24 points 3 years ago
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?
Tick_Dracy 1 point 3 years ago path: 0 4109695 4111319 4153346, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 1
SpaceNoodle -2 points 3 years ago
DDG is a search engine without its own search engine.
CeruleanRuin 11 points 3 years ago
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.
Amends1782 3 points 3 years ago
SearXNG enthusiasts
SEND_NOODLES_PLS 10 points 3 years ago
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.
UnderpantsWeevil 12 points 3 years ago
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?
Misconduct 10 points 3 years ago
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
UnderpantsWeevil 5 points 3 years ago
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".
Misconduct 1 point 3 years ago
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
SEND_NOODLES_PLS 3 points 3 years ago
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.
MaxVoltage 8 points 3 years ago
bro did you make that meme?
icedterminal 31 points 3 years ago
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.
BillyTheSkidMark 8 points 3 years ago
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.
TeddE 1 point 3 years ago
You're 100% right. Last I heard, Google makes about $300 per person every year from the data it collects on us.
… But I honestly think it's just a matter of time before the capitalist cook the golden goose and try to grab subscription bucks anyways.
LaChaleurDeLaNuit 4 points 3 years ago
it will be when it gets bought by Musk
UnD3Rgr0uNDCL0wN 4 points 3 years ago path: 0 4135714, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 0
Mantis_Toboggan 1 point 3 years ago
AOL and Lycos coming back from the gulag
clearedtoland 7 points 3 years ago
AskJeeves gang, where you at?
killeronthecorner 2 points 3 years ago
HotBot was my jam
killeronthecorner 2 points 3 years ago
In your endo
internetfuneral
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What is this place?
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• post obscure and surreal art with text
• nothing memetic, nothing boring
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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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