Ask HN: Would you ever pay to use a search engine? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Would you ever pay to use a search engine?

9 pointstima10117 comments

HI All, inspired by debate here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9960730

There are multiple ways to monetize website's traffic: 1) advertise, 2) make users subscribe, 3) hybrid (ads for non-paying users), 4) sell or upsell goods to the users.

Two questions:

1) Will you pay to Google $2.50/mo to remove ads (both tagged and hidden) 2) Will you pay to search engine which delivers more relevant results then Google and has no ads (same $2.50/mo)?

Please explain why. Thanks!

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There are services for people to do online research for you (e.g. https://wonderlib.com/), so I think it's fair to pay for a search engine that directly gives you highly relevant (and as you suggest, human-curated) results.

Whoa, did not know that such services exist. Thanks for link.

I would say that https://getmagicnow.com/ could also be considered as a kind of paid natural language search engine (limited to paid product or services).

Yeah, totally. I thought that Magic is on demand search engine for human intelligence as well. Not sure that it would easily scale though. Seems like database would be better than on-demand. Thanks for the insight.

You missed a 5th method, another (very annoying) hybrid: Advertise to everyone, maybe less to subscribers. The New Yorker is known for this model, among others.

To answer your poll (clarifying questions inline):

1. I would be willing to pay Google $30/year to opt-out of AdSense.

-Would I have to be logged in for the opt-out to work?

2. I would be willing to pay a Google competitor the same $30/year to have advertising-free results of equivalent quality.

-Where do you find another search engine whose results are more relevant? Do you mean having "non-personalized" results by default?

Thanks for reply.

1. Yes, say logged in with Gmail.

2. Say, results which are made by both robot-algorithm (like Google) but further refined with a human intelligence (curators).

I'd pay 10€/month for a google alternative. It should rank resources based on relevancy, not mixed up with any advertising or business-political reasons. And no filter bubble please (opt-out?).

Hah, that's a surprising answer. Thanks for sharing. Why not filter bubble? It does not do a good job guessing personalized results?

When you want to investigate about something new to you, you have to trust what a search engine gives you. When for whatever reason google wants to influence people, a little modification of search results for specific topics can make a big difference and push public opinion in any direction.

I prefer to get balanced views from all sights, and not only voices that agree with whatever i'm already thinking, pushing me further down a mental rabbit hole.

I see. Would you mind giving an example?

Nope, I won't, since it's basically impossible to prove it from the outside. But the raw possibility is enough. But I think that finding truly relevant results without clutter and people gaming the system is much harder than personalizing results, where one can cheat and find "close enough" results based on historical data and so on

I agree that former is harder. Thanks for the insight.

I dunno. I hate the idea of personalized ads for privacy reasons... but at the same time, if ads are inevitable, why not ones I'm interested in?

As for search results, a mix of logged-in-searches for usual topics and incognito for more unbiased results works well enough for me.

Yeah relevant ads are not as bad. Are you willing to pay to remove ads or get more relevant results?

URL from the debate thread: http://veekaybee.github.io/who-is-doing-this-to-my-internet/

It would be hard to get this to consumers, but plenty of other search engines have a non-advertising business model. ProQuest and EBSCO get their money from libraries and institutions, for example.

Could you please describe main obstacles? Academia is a specific market. Not sure it would feasible to charge companies to be listed on search engine for everyone.

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