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Just a thought experiment: If Google releases paid version of search where it won't show ads, personalize based on your click-through history and do not copy co

Just a thought experiment: If Google releases paid version of search where it won't show ads, personalize based on your click-through history and do not copy content from source for presentation, won't share your data with anyone, would you opt for it? Root cause of most of the issues seem to be monetization model of Google where they are optimising people to stay within their ecosystem.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
I'd like to be able to remove the ads, but I don't care about the rest of it. Besides removing ads, the other things you mention would make the service less valuable for me.
danShumway 6y ago
It's an interesting question. I don't trust Google, and a fast pivot to another product/offering wouldn't change that overnight, so I would lean towards no. I paid for Youtube Red, even though I never signed into the service on Youtube and even though I already got all of the Youtube-specific benefit in the form of adblocking and NewPipe. I did that purely to try and signal to Google, "I will pay for content, I want you to have revenue sources outside advertising." But ultimately Youtube Red seems to have been a failure, my signal hasn't changed the course of the company, and the parts of Youtube Red I did get value from (say, Music) have gotten noticeably worse over the years. I'm planning to drop my subscription in September. I think it would be tough for me to buy into another product like that from Google, my experience trying to buy products from Google to get around advertising/tracking has been both a practical and moral failure. Certainly I won't sign up for a paid GSuite account now. But I do already pay for Email (Fastmail), bookmarking (Wallabag), and a few other "free" internet services and apps today. So I might pay for search if a company like DuckDuckGo offered it instead of Google. But I would need to see what their offer actually was. I mean, heck, I'd be giving recurring donations to DuckDuckGo today if they accepted them, they're on my list of companies I want to exist. So paying 5$ a month for a "premium" search experience wouldn't really be that different, even if I never signed into it.
- erklik 6y ago
  > I mean, heck, I'd be giving recurring donations to DuckDuckGo today if they accepted them, they're on my list of companies I want to exist. So paying 5$ a month for a "premium" search experience wouldn't really be that different, even if I never signed into it. https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/donations/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/do... They seem to want you to enable their ads. Is that something you would ever do?
  - danShumway 6y ago
    Unfortunately no. Different people have different reasons for disabling ads. Some people only care about egregious ads and privacy violations, that's fine. I am against ads in general, I noticed a sharp quality of life increase when I started blocking ads universally everywhere I could, regardless of whether or not I was on the web. That's a longer conversation, I'm not going to get into it now. I respect that other people have different opinions, but I also feel reasonably strongly about my own. I do spread DuckDuckGo to other people, but I also spread uBlock Origin, so I'm not sure I'm a net positive there either. :) It's again, an interesting question. I've been pushing pretty hard in my personal life to financially support Open Source software that I use, projects that I really care about. DuckDuckGo is one of the few companies that I really like that I haven't ever really supported in any tangible way. I do feel guilty about that, but not guilty enough to allow myself to be turned into a product. There is likely no company where I would ever feel guilty enough to turn on ads. But given that DuckDuckGo isn't going to allow donations any time soon, I could see a lightweight 'premium' DuckDuckGo product effectively being a way for me to just give them money without it feeling to them like it's a donation. Actually, what I should do is to look into some of their merch and see what they offer and if they actually make a profit on it. I thought at one point DuckDuckGo sold shirts or something, but I don't know if they still do. Again though, this all kind of ends up being a messy proxy for donations. I'm not super-jazzed about walking around as a living billboard either, even for a company I like.
luckylion 6y ago
I don't care about the ads (I block them) or personalization (I don't go through their click-counting-script). I'd happily pay 10€/m for better results though.
ricardo81 6y ago
The difference in amounts between what Google makes per 1000 searches and what a profitable/sustainable search engine needs to make are quite vast. Can't remember the source but G make around ~$70 per 1000 searches. Bing make less than half than this, DDG less again. G commands higher rates because of higher competition for ads and also because of its retargeting and all the other methods that raise that per 1000 figure higher. To answer your question (sort of), Google's non-ad version would need to be expensive to break even with its current model.
anticensor 6y ago
> do not copy content from source for presentation That alone makes too different an experience.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago

I'd like to be able to remove the ads, but I don't care about the rest of it. Besides removing ads, the other things you mention would make the service less valuable for me.

danShumway 6y ago

It's an interesting question. I don't trust Google, and a fast pivot to another product/offering wouldn't change that overnight, so I would lean towards no. I paid for Youtube Red, even though I never signed into the service on Youtube and even though I already got all of the Youtube-specific benefit in the form of adblocking and NewPipe. I did that purely to try and signal to Google, "I will pay for content, I want you to have revenue sources outside advertising." But ultimately Youtube Red seems to have been a failure, my signal hasn't changed the course of the company, and the parts of Youtube Red I did get value from (say, Music) have gotten noticeably worse over the years. I'm planning to drop my subscription in September. I think it would be tough for me to buy into another product like that from Google, my experience trying to buy products from Google to get around advertising/tracking has been both a practical and moral failure. Certainly I won't sign up for a paid GSuite account now. But I do already pay for Email (Fastmail), bookmarking (Wallabag), and a few other "free" internet services and apps today. So I might pay for search if a company like DuckDuckGo offered it instead of Google. But I would need to see what their offer actually was. I mean, heck, I'd be giving recurring donations to DuckDuckGo today if they accepted them, they're on my list of companies I want to exist. So paying 5$ a month for a "premium" search experience wouldn't really be that different, even if I never signed into it.

erklik 6y ago
> I mean, heck, I'd be giving recurring donations to DuckDuckGo today if they accepted them, they're on my list of companies I want to exist. So paying 5$ a month for a "premium" search experience wouldn't really be that different, even if I never signed into it. https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/donations/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/do... They seem to want you to enable their ads. Is that something you would ever do?
- danShumway 6y ago
  Unfortunately no. Different people have different reasons for disabling ads. Some people only care about egregious ads and privacy violations, that's fine. I am against ads in general, I noticed a sharp quality of life increase when I started blocking ads universally everywhere I could, regardless of whether or not I was on the web. That's a longer conversation, I'm not going to get into it now. I respect that other people have different opinions, but I also feel reasonably strongly about my own. I do spread DuckDuckGo to other people, but I also spread uBlock Origin, so I'm not sure I'm a net positive there either. :) It's again, an interesting question. I've been pushing pretty hard in my personal life to financially support Open Source software that I use, projects that I really care about. DuckDuckGo is one of the few companies that I really like that I haven't ever really supported in any tangible way. I do feel guilty about that, but not guilty enough to allow myself to be turned into a product. There is likely no company where I would ever feel guilty enough to turn on ads. But given that DuckDuckGo isn't going to allow donations any time soon, I could see a lightweight 'premium' DuckDuckGo product effectively being a way for me to just give them money without it feeling to them like it's a donation. Actually, what I should do is to look into some of their merch and see what they offer and if they actually make a profit on it. I thought at one point DuckDuckGo sold shirts or something, but I don't know if they still do. Again though, this all kind of ends up being a messy proxy for donations. I'm not super-jazzed about walking around as a living billboard either, even for a company I like.

luckylion 6y ago

I don't care about the ads (I block them) or personalization (I don't go through their click-counting-script). I'd happily pay 10€/m for better results though.

ricardo81 6y ago

The difference in amounts between what Google makes per 1000 searches and what a profitable/sustainable search engine needs to make are quite vast. Can't remember the source but G make around ~$70 per 1000 searches. Bing make less than half than this, DDG less again. G commands higher rates because of higher competition for ads and also because of its retargeting and all the other methods that raise that per 1000 figure higher. To answer your question (sort of), Google's non-ad version would need to be expensive to break even with its current model.

anticensor 6y ago

> do not copy content from source for presentation That alone makes too different an experience.