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I think it’s really hard to balance without giving us better personal search settings. This is anecdotal of course, but I rarely find anything on free “as in be
by moksly 7y ago
I think it’s really hard to balance without giving us better personal search settings. This is anecdotal of course, but I rarely find anything on free “as in beer” media that’s worth my time. If Google excluded paywalled content its search functionality would be a lot less useful to me as a result.
On the other hand, you don’t subscribe to everything, and it might be useful to tune some of it out. Like I have a subscription to two Danish news papers, Information and Weekendavisen, and I like when google provides me with articles for them, because those articles are often going to be the height of what I want from my search results on subjects they cover. I don’t have a subscription to other Danish news papers, however, and maybe google would be better if it let me filter them. Maybe not though, it would certainly increase my personal bubble, but banning paywalls outright would really break google for me.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago> If Google excluded paywalled content its search functionality would be a lot less useful to me as a result.// Almost all companies would stop paywalling - well almost all those who get traffic to their site from Google [I'm being somewhat facetious, that's practically every site].
- mijamo 7y agoYou'd be surprised... There is a surprisingly high number of sites that do not rely at all on Google to get their audience. I would even dare to say it is the majority of sites. Google is a great way to get some random folk looking for something, but if you really KNOW your audience there are much better ways to reach it.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoI've done a little user training, every user (!) - including my own children - has typed in to the Google (or very occasionally Bing) search box in order to navigate to a website. Even if they know to type an address they don't use the address bar, they use Google. Drives me crazy.
- jpalomaki 7y agoWould help if you could easily filter out non-free results. Or highlight the free ones.
- m-p-3 7y agoOr put a little dollar sign beside non-free results, like they do (or did) for ads.