(In the case that someone in Lemmy still use Google)
That sounds unlikely… But they’re a small search provider with a small customer base, so costs will be high maintaining all the infrastructure needed.
As I linked elsewhere, Bing makes ~$10 per user per year. That’s really close to my $1/month figure. And that’s revenue, which doesn’t count advertiser acquisition costs and whatnot.
I’m unwilling to pay $5/month for limited searches, but I’m willing to pay for search if it’s reasonable.