8 ms·

A startup is testing a subscription model for search engines

80 points by cpeterso 6y ago

sushshshsh 6y ago
Never in a million years. No matter the price tag. I refuse to be billed for 95 different things in life
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
plextoria 6y ago
I would like to pay for web search, but per usage. I hate subscriptions because they are a pain to keep track of and I end up paying for stuff I don’t use, like Netflix.
- globular-toast 6y ago
  Definitely. I'd also love to have the busking model applied to music and videos online. I block all ads, including on Youtube, because they are annoying. But I'm often watching a video or listening to a track (like I am right now) where I would definitely click a button that donates 10p. Sometimes I'd click it multiple times. Youtube has the technology to identifier the rights holders for music and videos so this should easily be possible. I first heard this idea from Richard Stallman many years ago.
  - dewey 6y ago
    This was tried multiple times but it never took off. One that was kinda widespread at least in the Germany blog / podcast scene was: https://flattr.com https://flattr.com I think at some point they changed the way it works and it fizzled out. I barely see it any more. For YouTube: Maybe YouTube Premium is what you need then? No ads and you are supporting the creators you are watching.
    - globular-toast 6y ago
      No because Youtube Premium is a subscription model and I don't want to pay for anything I don't care for which is what would happen if I pay into a big pot. Flattr also follows the subscription model. I want the busking model. I provide my payment details but not a penny is spent until I click the button for a specific video/channel/piece. The key is low friction. It can't be some third party thing where you need to click away. It needs to be right there where you choose what to watch/listen to.
- smnrchrds 6y ago
  Per usage pricing will result in misaligned incentives. It will be in the interest of the search engine provider to provide worse results, so you have to make multiple searches and some trial and errors with keywords until you get the result you were looking for. In the end, the company notices that when they make improvements to their algorithms, their revenue goes down. So they stop making improvements.
  - Closi 6y ago
    Counterpoint: If they gave me terrible results I would just go to another service. If it's pay-per-search there is zero friction for me to go to another provider. It's probably not a practical charging mechanism, but it's an interesting thought. I also don't believe a monthly charging subscription is the right model but this is a tough one to get right.
    - smnrchrds 6y ago
      > Counterpoint: If they gave me terrible results I would just go to another service. There would be an optimum point where the results are good enough that people won't leave the service en masse, but bad enough that they spend way more than necessary on it. The optimum point is where the profits will be maximized for the search provider. Thanks to the advances is AI/ML/Data Science methods and tools, a savvy company will find this point and stays there until the point moves.
- zepearl 6y ago
  In my case I'm associating this service more to a news-service (e.g. arstechnica.com, golem.de) => I had no problems paying for their general subscription (3-5$/month) even if I don't ever read all their articles => I would most probably handle a search-engine the same way (and in this specific case limitations like e.g. max 10'000 search queries per month when using a "basic"-subscription would be ok for me).
Sloppy 6y ago
Count me signed up.
cvg 6y ago
I like this user-centric vision of the web where users are customers. We’re trained so deeply that ad supported is free, when really it’s just a deferment of costs. Companies always get you by adding marketing costs into their costs. Once Neeva cleans up their data policies, I’m al in with them.
qchris 6y ago
This seems like some pretty good reporting-- I was particularly interested by the sections noting the difference between the marketing speech that is featured heavily on the site and the actual language used in the privacy policy and ToS. Those kind of discrepancies really make it tough for me to get interested in a company, because despite the best intentions of people, function often follows form. If an organization doesn't take their mission seriously enough to modify their corporate structure to fundamentally align the two (I think a public benefit corporation with reporting requirements is an example of that), then I'm not sure why other people should either.
chadash 6y ago
Count me out. I'm willing to pay for things that improve my life, but if anything, this is likely to be a downgrade in terms of user experience. Google benefits from the fact that they have billions of users. The nominal cost of their overhead per user is very very low. A company like this is gonna struggle to get even a million users, let alone billions. So even if they charge, it's unlikely they can keep up with Google's infrastructure. I care about my privacy a little, but less than the cost of a subscription + added hassle / downgraded user experience. I'm betting the the market of people for whom the tradeoff is worthwhile is low enough thast this company won't take off. But I support competition, so I hope i'm wrong.
- gentleman11 6y ago
  Even if you don’t care much about your own privacy, take a moment to consider whether the entire population should lose their privacy as well, and what that sort of world could look like if a bad leader took over (or just at China). The issue isn’t just about personal consequences
- 6510 6y ago
  > cost of a subscription + added hassle / downgraded user experience you forgot the ads! > it's unlikely they can keep up with Google's infrastructure. A custom search engine for a specific scope of interests will very quickly get better than google. Take YaCy, feed just HN into it and have it crawl 2 or 3 pages deep. The level of curation around here isn't modest. Take your own comments and have it crawl a bit deeper for those. If someone without technical skills can make something like that in a few [low effort] days without any fancy hardware it should be easy to make the proverbial google killer. Finding a niche worth buying a subscription for is a different story entirely ofc. I imagine it could be bundled with something less ambitious that people are used to pay for that caters to the same niche.
  - robjan 6y ago
    You've just described the Google filter bubble
  - chris_f 6y ago
garmaine 6y ago
Why would I use this when DuckDuckGo exists?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
alfiedotwtf 6y ago
Off-topic, but what did ever happen to Cuil?
- Animats 6y ago
  Failed to get another round of funding and shut down very suddenly. Founders were hired by Google to keep them from trying again.
  - alfiedotwtf 6y ago
    Ah. Damn, that’s a shame
    - Animats 6y ago
      I talked to them. They wanted to undercut Google on cost. If you don't do personalization, running a search engine isn't that expensive. I asked what the business model was. They didn't have a revenue plan. That was a problem.
ALittleLight 6y ago
I'm very interested in the idea, but I don't like: "Like Neeva, Startpage sources search results externally—in its case, directly from Google" I've been having a lot of trouble with Google search results lately. They seem to be getting worse all the time. I'd love to join a new search engine, but if the limit of their search quality is Google, I just can't get that excited. I'd prefer to start using something that is 80% of the quality of Google and getting better, than something that is fixed to Google.
- sjtindell 6y ago
  To me this isn’t a problem with Google, but with SEO. Gaming the system to get a better ranking is an entire industry now, and that won’t stop no matter which engine is the most popular.
  - basch 6y ago
    Google also seems to be preferring new results. SEO is part of it, but SEO shouldnt change the good content google already had indexed. SEO
    - CamperBob2 6y ago
      Honestly, it's about time they tweaked their algorithm to favor newer content in many areas. I'm tired of getting five- to ten-year old pages when searching on contemporary technical topics or looking for a workaround for the latest Firefox weirdness.
  - ALittleLight 6y ago
    One solution would be a good, but unpopular search engine. SEO wouldn't optimize for it because the returns wouldn't be there, and I could use it and get good results, because it would be good. I can imagine paying a subscription to use it is one way to have a good and unpopular search engine.
    - asdff 6y ago
devmunchies 6y ago
> If you want the most impact to help the most people with privacy, you have to be free -- DDG CEO This is true, but only relevant if your goal is to help the most people. Looking at companies like Superhuman (premium email client for business executives and investors), you can build a company that focusses on power users. If a search engine were to be optimized for Programers, Product Managers, Team Leads, Directors, etc it could improve lot's of people's work.
ozten 6y ago
The positioning is confusing, but could be a potential FYI[1] competitor. Their goal is to provide unified search across Dropbox, Google Docs, Google Drive, etc which businesses would happily pay for. Or perhaps a vertical search engine for B2B... If it is truly a general B2C search engine play, I think ignoring DDG as a datapoint is a misstep. [1] https://usefyi.com/ https://usefyi.com/
golemiprague 6y ago
Don't mind paying but would like to know that they are not going to skew the results based on politics or at least give an option to opt out of them deciding for me what is fake news and what is acceptable content and all those things. Basically a big check box saying "I am not a lefty, bring it on". Or maybe even a scale where you can play with it yourself and see what kind of results suits you the best, if you want the news coming more from the Guardian or Breitbart, it should be up to the user.
bookmarkable 6y ago
What does this solve that DuckDuckGo hasn’t?
chris_f 6y ago
It makes no sense that this article writes off DuckDuckGo as a similar offering and compares it more to Startpage. DDG and Neeva are both based on Bing, and both integrate (or plan to integrate) many other search sources. Startpage only provides Google results supplemented by Wikipedia for some queries. The one advantage Neeva might have is that it integrates personal services as search sources (like gmail and dropbox). Personally that has never been a pain point for me though. A few months back I started working on a search engine (in my sig) based on the hypothesis that a better search engine can be built by curating vertical specific sources to provide higher relevance for niche search topics. I truly believe a federated data source search engine will be the future, but time will tell.
Kiro 6y ago
> However, DuckDuckGo may not be the most relevant comparison to Neeva. The new search engine is planned to be a second-tier provider, with public results sourced from Bing, Weather.com, Intrinio, and Apple. DDG is also a second-tier provider that is sourcing its results from Bing. > We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google). Source: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
1024core 6y ago
The biggest problem with Google currently is: monetization. Try searching for a commercial term. For example: say you want to buy an OLED TV, and want to see what it looks like wall-mounted. So try "OLED65CXPUA wallmount" in Google, and you're barraged with ads and ads-disguised-as-content. Even the Google Image Search page is littered with ads (both overt and covert).
davidhyde 6y ago
It would be great if the subscription money went to automatically unlocking pay walled content so we don't have to individually sign up to all these sites we would rather not share our details with.
Nginx487 6y ago
How it would fit the market with services like DuckDuckGo, Startpage and SearX? All these services provide internet search for free. DuckDuckGo has its own engine, Startpage and SearX are meta-engines, reusing existing services.
- Shank 6y ago
  I hate to be the eleventh person to say this, but it bares repeating if it gets lost: DuckDuckGo primarily uses the Bing index and search engine for most results. There isn't any set of branding that says this plainly, but that's where most results are coming from. Startpage is pretty different because it uses Google under the hood, but I definitely get different results from Google, Startpage, and DuckDuckGo with regular frequency. Whatever the secret sauce is on top matters a lot in terms of presentation. Any engine that puts in effort for a target audience will be able to acquire users. For me, DuckDuckHack has always returned really awesome results on top of what I consider to be a fairly lackluster set of results for some searches that bing provides. If another provider wanted to step it up with extra sauce on top, I'd be more than happy to try if it makes my day to day better.
  - Nginx487 6y ago
    Thanks for the insight, however, would you provide some source, explaining how DuckDuckGo-Bing "hack" is implemented. > but I definitely get different results from Google, Startpage, and DuckDuckGo Different results from Google and Startpage are expected, because Google offers personalized search adjustment. Even if you're not logged in, Google uses Ubercookies and fingerprinting techniques to identify you as a unique user
    - Kiro 6y ago
      https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so... > > We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google).
Animats 6y ago
Neeva is interesting. It might be worth having a premium search engine. The first pages of Google and Bing are now almost all ads. Often, badly chosen ads. Some people may pay $10 a month not to see that. But it's a niche. I don't see how this gets big. Maybe if it was sold to Comcast or AT&T and came bundled with Internet connectivity. Anybody know anyone over at Neeva? I'd like to talk to them.
didip 6y ago
I have this dream of an alternate search engine: * Aggressively prune bad actors (spammy, zero-value, etc.) with ML. * I am ok with rated-E only content (no porn, etc). * Zero ads, I am fine with paying premium subscription price / month. This dream search engine should have a considerably small index size, thus low operational costs.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
swyx 6y ago
> Like Neeva, Startpage sources search results externally—in its case, directly from Google. Unlike Neeva, Startpage still shows Google ads and collects a cut of the proceeds anyone know how this works? can any startup just proxy Google like that, or do you need to be some sort of official search partner of Google? just curious bc I have often wondered if I myself could attempt a modified search system as a side project.
opqpo 6y ago
It may work for enterprises that want to search the web via an API. But for normal people? I extremely doubt it.

80 points by cpeterso 6y ago

sushshshsh 6y ago

Never in a million years. No matter the price tag. I refuse to be billed for 95 different things in life

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

plextoria 6y ago

I would like to pay for web search, but per usage. I hate subscriptions because they are a pain to keep track of and I end up paying for stuff I don’t use, like Netflix.

globular-toast 6y ago
Definitely. I'd also love to have the busking model applied to music and videos online. I block all ads, including on Youtube, because they are annoying. But I'm often watching a video or listening to a track (like I am right now) where I would definitely click a button that donates 10p. Sometimes I'd click it multiple times. Youtube has the technology to identifier the rights holders for music and videos so this should easily be possible. I first heard this idea from Richard Stallman many years ago.
- dewey 6y ago
  This was tried multiple times but it never took off. One that was kinda widespread at least in the Germany blog / podcast scene was: https://flattr.com https://flattr.com I think at some point they changed the way it works and it fizzled out. I barely see it any more. For YouTube: Maybe YouTube Premium is what you need then? No ads and you are supporting the creators you are watching.
  - globular-toast 6y ago
    No because Youtube Premium is a subscription model and I don't want to pay for anything I don't care for which is what would happen if I pay into a big pot. Flattr also follows the subscription model. I want the busking model. I provide my payment details but not a penny is spent until I click the button for a specific video/channel/piece. The key is low friction. It can't be some third party thing where you need to click away. It needs to be right there where you choose what to watch/listen to.
smnrchrds 6y ago
Per usage pricing will result in misaligned incentives. It will be in the interest of the search engine provider to provide worse results, so you have to make multiple searches and some trial and errors with keywords until you get the result you were looking for. In the end, the company notices that when they make improvements to their algorithms, their revenue goes down. So they stop making improvements.
- Closi 6y ago
  Counterpoint: If they gave me terrible results I would just go to another service. If it's pay-per-search there is zero friction for me to go to another provider. It's probably not a practical charging mechanism, but it's an interesting thought. I also don't believe a monthly charging subscription is the right model but this is a tough one to get right.
  - smnrchrds 6y ago
    > Counterpoint: If they gave me terrible results I would just go to another service. There would be an optimum point where the results are good enough that people won't leave the service en masse, but bad enough that they spend way more than necessary on it. The optimum point is where the profits will be maximized for the search provider. Thanks to the advances is AI/ML/Data Science methods and tools, a savvy company will find this point and stays there until the point moves.
zepearl 6y ago
In my case I'm associating this service more to a news-service (e.g. arstechnica.com, golem.de) => I had no problems paying for their general subscription (3-5$/month) even if I don't ever read all their articles => I would most probably handle a search-engine the same way (and in this specific case limitations like e.g. max 10'000 search queries per month when using a "basic"-subscription would be ok for me).

Sloppy 6y ago

Count me signed up.

cvg 6y ago

I like this user-centric vision of the web where users are customers. We’re trained so deeply that ad supported is free, when really it’s just a deferment of costs. Companies always get you by adding marketing costs into their costs. Once Neeva cleans up their data policies, I’m al in with them.

qchris 6y ago

This seems like some pretty good reporting-- I was particularly interested by the sections noting the difference between the marketing speech that is featured heavily on the site and the actual language used in the privacy policy and ToS. Those kind of discrepancies really make it tough for me to get interested in a company, because despite the best intentions of people, function often follows form. If an organization doesn't take their mission seriously enough to modify their corporate structure to fundamentally align the two (I think a public benefit corporation with reporting requirements is an example of that), then I'm not sure why other people should either.

chadash 6y ago

Count me out. I'm willing to pay for things that improve my life, but if anything, this is likely to be a downgrade in terms of user experience. Google benefits from the fact that they have billions of users. The nominal cost of their overhead per user is very very low. A company like this is gonna struggle to get even a million users, let alone billions. So even if they charge, it's unlikely they can keep up with Google's infrastructure. I care about my privacy a little, but less than the cost of a subscription + added hassle / downgraded user experience. I'm betting the the market of people for whom the tradeoff is worthwhile is low enough thast this company won't take off. But I support competition, so I hope i'm wrong.

gentleman11 6y ago
Even if you don’t care much about your own privacy, take a moment to consider whether the entire population should lose their privacy as well, and what that sort of world could look like if a bad leader took over (or just at China). The issue isn’t just about personal consequences
6510 6y ago
> cost of a subscription + added hassle / downgraded user experience you forgot the ads! > it's unlikely they can keep up with Google's infrastructure. A custom search engine for a specific scope of interests will very quickly get better than google. Take YaCy, feed just HN into it and have it crawl 2 or 3 pages deep. The level of curation around here isn't modest. Take your own comments and have it crawl a bit deeper for those. If someone without technical skills can make something like that in a few [low effort] days without any fancy hardware it should be easy to make the proverbial google killer. Finding a niche worth buying a subscription for is a different story entirely ofc. I imagine it could be bundled with something less ambitious that people are used to pay for that caters to the same niche.
- robjan 6y ago
  You've just described the Google filter bubble
- chris_f 6y ago

garmaine 6y ago

Why would I use this when DuckDuckGo exists?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

alfiedotwtf 6y ago

Off-topic, but what did ever happen to Cuil?

Animats 6y ago
Failed to get another round of funding and shut down very suddenly. Founders were hired by Google to keep them from trying again.
- alfiedotwtf 6y ago
  Ah. Damn, that’s a shame
  - Animats 6y ago
    I talked to them. They wanted to undercut Google on cost. If you don't do personalization, running a search engine isn't that expensive. I asked what the business model was. They didn't have a revenue plan. That was a problem.

ALittleLight 6y ago

I'm very interested in the idea, but I don't like: "Like Neeva, Startpage sources search results externally—in its case, directly from Google" I've been having a lot of trouble with Google search results lately. They seem to be getting worse all the time. I'd love to join a new search engine, but if the limit of their search quality is Google, I just can't get that excited. I'd prefer to start using something that is 80% of the quality of Google and getting better, than something that is fixed to Google.

sjtindell 6y ago
To me this isn’t a problem with Google, but with SEO. Gaming the system to get a better ranking is an entire industry now, and that won’t stop no matter which engine is the most popular.
- basch 6y ago
  Google also seems to be preferring new results. SEO is part of it, but SEO shouldnt change the good content google already had indexed. SEO
  - CamperBob2 6y ago
    Honestly, it's about time they tweaked their algorithm to favor newer content in many areas. I'm tired of getting five- to ten-year old pages when searching on contemporary technical topics or looking for a workaround for the latest Firefox weirdness.
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  One solution would be a good, but unpopular search engine. SEO wouldn't optimize for it because the returns wouldn't be there, and I could use it and get good results, because it would be good. I can imagine paying a subscription to use it is one way to have a good and unpopular search engine.
  - asdff 6y ago

devmunchies 6y ago

> If you want the most impact to help the most people with privacy, you have to be free -- DDG CEO This is true, but only relevant if your goal is to help the most people. Looking at companies like Superhuman (premium email client for business executives and investors), you can build a company that focusses on power users. If a search engine were to be optimized for Programers, Product Managers, Team Leads, Directors, etc it could improve lot's of people's work.

ozten 6y ago

The positioning is confusing, but could be a potential FYI[1] competitor. Their goal is to provide unified search across Dropbox, Google Docs, Google Drive, etc which businesses would happily pay for. Or perhaps a vertical search engine for B2B... If it is truly a general B2C search engine play, I think ignoring DDG as a datapoint is a misstep. [1] https://usefyi.com/ https://usefyi.com/

golemiprague 6y ago

Don't mind paying but would like to know that they are not going to skew the results based on politics or at least give an option to opt out of them deciding for me what is fake news and what is acceptable content and all those things. Basically a big check box saying "I am not a lefty, bring it on". Or maybe even a scale where you can play with it yourself and see what kind of results suits you the best, if you want the news coming more from the Guardian or Breitbart, it should be up to the user.

bookmarkable 6y ago

What does this solve that DuckDuckGo hasn’t?

chris_f 6y ago

It makes no sense that this article writes off DuckDuckGo as a similar offering and compares it more to Startpage. DDG and Neeva are both based on Bing, and both integrate (or plan to integrate) many other search sources. Startpage only provides Google results supplemented by Wikipedia for some queries. The one advantage Neeva might have is that it integrates personal services as search sources (like gmail and dropbox). Personally that has never been a pain point for me though. A few months back I started working on a search engine (in my sig) based on the hypothesis that a better search engine can be built by curating vertical specific sources to provide higher relevance for niche search topics. I truly believe a federated data source search engine will be the future, but time will tell.

Kiro 6y ago

> However, DuckDuckGo may not be the most relevant comparison to Neeva. The new search engine is planned to be a second-tier provider, with public results sourced from Bing, Weather.com, Intrinio, and Apple. DDG is also a second-tier provider that is sourcing its results from Bing. > We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google). Source: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

1024core 6y ago

The biggest problem with Google currently is: monetization. Try searching for a commercial term. For example: say you want to buy an OLED TV, and want to see what it looks like wall-mounted. So try "OLED65CXPUA wallmount" in Google, and you're barraged with ads and ads-disguised-as-content. Even the Google Image Search page is littered with ads (both overt and covert).

davidhyde 6y ago

It would be great if the subscription money went to automatically unlocking pay walled content so we don't have to individually sign up to all these sites we would rather not share our details with.

Nginx487 6y ago

How it would fit the market with services like DuckDuckGo, Startpage and SearX? All these services provide internet search for free. DuckDuckGo has its own engine, Startpage and SearX are meta-engines, reusing existing services.

Shank 6y ago
I hate to be the eleventh person to say this, but it bares repeating if it gets lost: DuckDuckGo primarily uses the Bing index and search engine for most results. There isn't any set of branding that says this plainly, but that's where most results are coming from. Startpage is pretty different because it uses Google under the hood, but I definitely get different results from Google, Startpage, and DuckDuckGo with regular frequency. Whatever the secret sauce is on top matters a lot in terms of presentation. Any engine that puts in effort for a target audience will be able to acquire users. For me, DuckDuckHack has always returned really awesome results on top of what I consider to be a fairly lackluster set of results for some searches that bing provides. If another provider wanted to step it up with extra sauce on top, I'd be more than happy to try if it makes my day to day better.
- Nginx487 6y ago
  Thanks for the insight, however, would you provide some source, explaining how DuckDuckGo-Bing "hack" is implemented. > but I definitely get different results from Google, Startpage, and DuckDuckGo Different results from Google and Startpage are expected, because Google offers personalized search adjustment. Even if you're not logged in, Google uses Ubercookies and fingerprinting techniques to identify you as a unique user
  - Kiro 6y ago
    https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so... > > We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google).

Animats 6y ago

Neeva is interesting. It might be worth having a premium search engine. The first pages of Google and Bing are now almost all ads. Often, badly chosen ads. Some people may pay $10 a month not to see that. But it's a niche. I don't see how this gets big. Maybe if it was sold to Comcast or AT&T and came bundled with Internet connectivity. Anybody know anyone over at Neeva? I'd like to talk to them.

didip 6y ago

I have this dream of an alternate search engine: * Aggressively prune bad actors (spammy, zero-value, etc.) with ML. * I am ok with rated-E only content (no porn, etc). * Zero ads, I am fine with paying premium subscription price / month. This dream search engine should have a considerably small index size, thus low operational costs.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

swyx 6y ago

> Like Neeva, Startpage sources search results externally—in its case, directly from Google. Unlike Neeva, Startpage still shows Google ads and collects a cut of the proceeds anyone know how this works? can any startup just proxy Google like that, or do you need to be some sort of official search partner of Google? just curious bc I have often wondered if I myself could attempt a modified search system as a side project.

opqpo 6y ago

It may work for enterprises that want to search the web via an API. But for normal people? I extremely doubt it.