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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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’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
