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 post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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internet funeral
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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.
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You just dated the hell out of yourself, but also showed how young you are at the same time.
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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
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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!"
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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
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.
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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.
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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
I think you understood, but Elon didn't 🤣
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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.
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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.
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?
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bro did you make that meme?
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