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
It’s not just an advertising service. I can also get info from it as well. Like if I ask how many national parks are in Wyoming, or is it ok for me to brush my dog’s fur if it’s been 2 weeks since his surgery… those 2 search results did not show me advertisements of camping tents, or a dog brush on Amazon, it gave me the info i wanted right off the bat. So you are wrong
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.
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.
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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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?
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.
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.
Actual Internet funeral
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’d pay for google if they didn’t steal my data.
Bluff called
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Because, why would anyone pay money to Google for Kagi? Duh!
For whatever reason, mentioning Kagi brings downvotes.
Edit edit: y’all are just oh my goodness! le heckin internets for everyone!!
searxng/startpage
Searxng is awesome
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?
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
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.
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.
Not quite there for non-tech folks, but the paid search engine Kagi immensely improved my search experience.
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.
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.
but why do that when there’s options like using ecosia and uBlock Origin.
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.
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.
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.
I would 100% pay $15/month to use Google products without being tracked and sold.
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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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YaCy
Haha funny guy.
That’s the most unhinged thing I’ve read in - well 5 minutes but it’s still crazy
What is unhinged about it?
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?
mamma.com too
and excite, alltheweb, webcrawler and looksmart too
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.
Fucking do it, I dare you.
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SearXNG enthusiasts
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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.
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?
