[mfDjB]

For me, Google Search just doesn't seem to be getting better over the years, if anything its getting worse. I honestly feel like its hard to get what I want half the time with all the SEO spam, most of the time I have to input "inurl:reddit.com" just to get good results.

At the same time, ChatGPT has frequently impressed me, not with everything (my expectations are reasonably low) but it has performed amazing work for me (typing out form letters, code language conversions).

For what it's worth I wouldn't use ChatGPT for search like I do with Google, but what it has done is taken away time I would be Googling for things like "how to write X form letter". I expect as it matures, it will take more time away from me Googling.

All these takes underestimate the following:

1) How quickly ChatGPT and its ilk will advance to solve relatively low hanging fruit like "ChatGPT is wrong about this one thing". The delta is extremely important here.

2) How slowly the Google bureaucracy will grind when releasing anything remotely like ChatGPT. All the committees and the burdensome processes in place in Google will keep this new technology locked up for years, and ensure that the final result is a camel (horse designed by committee). It doesn't matter if they have superior technology if they never use it or release it.

3) How much Search means to Google will mean they will treat any product changes to it extremely carefully while Microsoft will be willing to experiment with Bing like they have with Co-Pilot and GitHub.

Personally, I wouldn't go long on search engines that don't have a strong ML component to them in the future.

[ravenstine]

I know this thread is about ChatGPT, but if you're still using Google then I suggest giving Kagi a try. It's a paid search engine, but I've been using it for quite a while now and really enjoy it. With Kagi you can rank and downrank domains as well as block them. There's also this think called "lenses" which are basically filters for specific kinds of searches. For instance, I have a "Programming" lens and a "Academic Research" lens.

> Personally, I wouldn't go long on search engines that don't have a strong ML component to them in the future.

What's kind of ironic about this is I think search engines may have mistakenly moved away from strong ML in the sense that you're thinking of.

Yes, ML is being used for recommendations much more than ever, but in terms of heuristically finding pages with the keywords you entered, mainstream search engines have become significantly worse at it. I remember a time when The Google would find any pages with the keywords you entered. In recent years (before I stopped using it), I noticed an increasing number of times where I knew it had a page indexed but it would refuse to include it in the results for whatever reason. Either its ability to fuzzy search pages seemed diminished or it would just not match something word-for-word. I could sometimes figure this out when the page I was looking for previously accidentally came up in the results for another barely-related search, so I knew it wasn't that the search engine was culling old pages. Though I'm sure they're doing that as well where they think they can get away with it.

Recommendations and curation are largely overrated, and that's where a lot of ML has been mistakenly applied. Well, I say mistakenly in the sense that it benefits the individual and society. Recommendation engines do serve the purpose of the company selling those recommendations.

A true application of machine learning to answer engines is the future and will be a big problem for companies that fought the advertising wars by banking on recommendation engines. That is unless they turn their ship soon enough.

[viraptor]

> With Kagi you can rank and downrank domains as well as block them.

This is a killer feature and I don't understand why ddg and Google don't do it. Google doesn't even have to respect that list for ads. Just give me a way to remove all results from domain X, Y and Z. There are already extensions which do that, but I can't use them on my mobile. It would improve my Google satisfaction massively since it's normally the same blogspam that I run into.

[davidmurdoch]

Blocking domains used to be built in to Google Search.

[spritefs]

This is something that could very easily be done with a meta search engine or alternative frontend like whoogle (assuming it isn't already implemented, could be)

[david_allison]

Kagi's 'sourced' LLM is available for free currently: https://labs.kagi.com/ai/contextai

[Agraillo]

Thanks for mentioning. Interestingly, I recently tested several systems with identical questions (https://www.perplexity.ai/, https://www.phind.com (formerly beta.sayhello.so). The Kagi beta is sometimes on par, sometimes much better. Try [ what guests who are not actors were interviewed by smartless podcast ]. Most gives a mix of actors and non-actors, but Kagi's both Web+AI and AI sections provides correct answers.

[duckmysick]

This is fun. I tried this prompt: "Should I become a paying customer of Kagi?"

I like how it links references to support the arguments. It even gives cons and one of the sources is a HN thread from 2016! [1] It's not there yet though, because that one was about the now defunct online store platform and payment processor.

On the other hand, maybe it's my fault. I didn't specify that I meant Kagi the search engine. But it's promising.

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12200972

[odysseus]

Note that Brave Search also has "lenses" / filters, and it has them for free. https://search.brave.com/goggles

There's a copycats removal goggle and a HackerNews-top1000-sites goggle. I use them from time to time, but wish I could automatically include the filter with all searches by default (or maybe there's a way and I don't know how).

[t0bia_s]

"I suggest giving Kagi a try. It's a paid search engine"

I dont like the idea of linking my search queries with credit card.

[hgomersall]

I can only assume if you don't think Google knows exactly who you are, you must have much more internet hygiene than most people do.

[t0bia_s]

I don't use any google product over 6 years.

[supermatt]

You posted multiple youtube links here 1 month ago. A link to a google search 9 months ago. And thats just the stuff you felt the need to post on hackernews. Clearly you use google products.

[t0bia_s]

I dont have to be log in to watch youtube (I use FreeTube). At the end... Yeah, I use google product everyday, because of DNS.

Point was, that I refuse to use search engine that is tighten to my credit card.

[alwayslikethis]

Yeah. I don't mind paying, but no amount of assurance is enough to convince to put them in a position easily link my web activity with my credit card, and hence real life identity. Just let me pay with Monero or something.

[loehnsberg]

+1 for Kagi: I have been using it for a year now. I still use Google on my phone (Kagi's own browser Orion is still a bit buggy), so I can compare daily. Classic search results are comparable, with lenses they are even better, plus Kagi has no ads. Also highlights have dramatically improved over the past year. I hope they find a way to filter out the noise generated by ChatGPT generated content.

[pbronez]

+1 for Kagi. The lenses and customization are nice, but I switched just for the raw query speed. It’s the snappiest service I use daily.

[michaelsalim]

Really? I'd +1 for kagi too. But I have 2 problems with it. The first is the load speed. Sometimes it just takes so long that I just repeat my search to Google, especially on phones. By long I meant a few second so it's not that bad. Just long enough that I lose patience.

I'm not sure if it's issues with my connection since I rarely go to Google nowadays. But I never felt the same problem with Google.

In case you're curious, the second issue I have is with private browsing. The session is not carried over so I'm not logged in. I keep forgetting this and kept having to manually open Google and retype my query. I guess not technically Kagi's fault but still.

[freediver]

Kagi has a private session token feature that you can use to carry on searching in private window (also a browser extension that does this automatically).

[t0bia_s]

But still you have to be log in with your account that is linked with your credit card.

[petesergeant]

If you used a prepaid card in a different jurisdiction (and that didn’t verify names), anyone coming after you would need warrants from two countries or to have breached two systems.

[redox99]

Back when Kagi was free by invitation, I tried about 10 or 20 queries on both Google and Kagi, and Kagi was equal or worse in all of them. It lacked crucial features like showing how old each result was. YMMV.

[ekianjo]

> I suggest giving Kagi a try

Does not have a sound business model. Let's not waste time on something that is not viable.

[xp84]

Are you implying that advertising is the only viable business model? I really hope you're wrong, if so. Ads have corrupted and made worse everything they've touched online. I would really like to see a new generation of services that aren't ad-based.

Personally it seems weird to me that people assume things like search and email must be completely "free with ads," while nobody expects anything in the offline world to be free with ads. Even TV, if we're being honest, since while broadcast technically exists, it seems the vast majority of people who watch it pay for cable. Why couldn't ad-free gmail and search be a $20 addon to your internet plan? Most people couldn't function normally with NO search engine today, so what's wrong with allocating the kind of money to it that would buy 2-3 cups of coffee?

[thayne]

> Why couldn't ad-free gmail and search be a $20 addon to your internet plan?

A lot of ISPs include email. and it is usually terrible.

[xp84]

Sure, but it’s not because of the lack of ads, but rather because they know virtually nobody uses it. I was imagining paid Gmail, but Internet “with Gmail(tm)” being a bundle they would advertise, like when DirecTV offered TiVo. Or when you can buy HBO through Amazon Prime.

[thayne]

But nobody uses it because it isn't as good as gmail. Before Gmail, it was a lot more common to use your ISP's email. And given the current monopoly power of ISPs I'm pretty doubtful that any such bundling would be in users' best interests.

[ekianjo]

> Are you implying that advertising is the only viable business model?

No. does not mean that Kagi's current business model is viable either. Strawman much?

[jlarocco]

So what?

For now it's clearly better, and not very expensive.

If it fails, I'll find something else, until then why not use it?

[freediver]

Care to expand on that?

[s3p]

I will. As a Kagi user I loved the quality and authenticity of search results but couldn't justify paying $10 / month for it. In my view that is far too expensive for something I can get for free from Google/DDG with concessions.

[freediver]

Fundamentally there are only two business models available for search.

Since searching the vastness of the web in under 500ms is not free, it is either the user paying for that, or a 3rd party (usually advertisers) paying on the behalf of the user. We (Kagi) thought that for something as intimate as search the latter made no sense, hence the birth of paid search business model where incentives between the user and search engine are aligned.

Price not being right for you currently is another matter, and hopefully one day it will be (you could help by sharing feedback how to improve the product, and there is new Kagi pricing coming up soon).

I personally pay for YouTube Premium ($15/month I believe?) just to not have to see ads on any device I watch YouTube on. Many people would never consider that, but many (~25 million subscribers [1]) still do, despite being able to watch videos for free, availability of adblockers and what not. So YouTube Premium makes half a billion dollars every month and that is essentially using the same business model as Kagi's.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1261865/youtube-premium-...

[Physkal]

If allowed, how does kagi perform with adult searches?

[edgyquant]

I paid for it before even using it. So I disagree that you not wanting to justifies claiming it’s a bad business model

[ekianjo]

They license search results from other search engines, and other search engines have the ability to increase their fees anytime they want to make Kagi suffocate if needed. It's not sustainable.

[freediver]

There is a an objective risk of building on top of somebody else's platform. However, that does not mean that the business model is not sound, but that perhaps the execution may be limited in terms of how big it can get. (Kagi's aspiration was never to be a Google killer [1]).

Companies are built on top of other platforms all the time. TikTok is building on top of iOS and Android. Zynga made first $1bn building on top of Facebook platform. Honey a chrome extension was acquired for $4bn. Those are all businesses building on top of somebody elses platform.

In terms of Google's motiviation to suffocate it, even if Kagi had 10 million customers, it would be a drop in the sea for Google. And Kagi's very existence helps Google with monopoly issues so it is hard to see why would Google want to openly suffocate it. Even if it did, there are plenty of other search indexes out there (Bing, Yandex, Mojeek...) that Kagi can source. What users love about Kagi is not just the quality of search but innovative search features that are independent of results.

What matters at the end of the day, is that Kagi is already serving thousands of paying customers, they love the product and if anything that is the validation that a business model is working.

[1] https://kagi.com/faq#Google-killer

[mrtksn]

> Personally, I wouldn't go long on search engines that don't have a strong ML component to them in the future.

Arguably, it's the ML that made Google useless for some people. Since some time, Google seems to be curating it's results to address searches in a question format. In the past we were searching for occurrences of our keywords in webpages but today Google seems to be trying to be an answer machine. Unfortunately it's not very good at it and it is just as inaccurate as ChatGPT.

[pixl97]

>In the past we were searching for occurrences of our keywords in webpages

I mean that died decades ago when spammers just made pages with your word repeated over and over again. Spam makes everything worse.

[mrtksn]

Completely agree. I wish Google was able to fix spam instead of trying to be something else than a search engine.

The cynic in me thinks that Google is doing it because it’s more profitable. If the results are crap, maybe ads are a better content? it’s not like you are going to use Bing?

[snidane]

Google made terrible mistakes with their main cash cow of search.

They removed the important feature to search only forums, ie. human generated content, and promoted SEO spam to the top instead. Public forums became undiscoverable and people moved to walled gardens of facebook and similar instead.

Then Google killed the search by trying to make it some AI answering robot. Now they ignore what you even ask it and just return to you what they think you'd want.

All that people were asking for was a better search engine and all we got was an inferior version of a chat bot.

[charlieyu1]

I don't even understand why Google doesn't allow blocking some sites in search results. Paid ads, I understand, these generate profits. Although Facebook still allow me to remove some ads that I don't want to see. But unpaid SEO rubbish, how does it benefit Google at all? If anything these parasites bogs down the quality of search results

[jsnell]

They had a feature to block domains from search results in the past (like, 10 years ago). It was removed. I don't know why, but it feels like exactly the kind of feature that sounds great on paper but doesn't actually survive contact with real users.

First, I'd bet that very few people are actually interested in doing that kind of manual curation or engaging with power user features. How large a % of users need to interact with this for the feature to be worth maintaining (in all the backends and frontends)? How many of them actually do so?

Second, the task of blocking spam is adversarial and sisyphean. Trying to deal with web spam by domain blocking (with an individual blocklist) would be like trying to deal with email spam with your own blocklist of spam words. The results will be worse than whatever can be done centrally, where much more information is available both on the sites and on how users actually interact with those domains. And even if you managed to make a good blocklist for a point in time, your job is not done. Tens of thousands of new domains will have popped out next week.

(The dream here of course would be to use the block decisions from individual users to drive the centralized protections. But unless legit users are actually using this in very significant numbers, it'll quickly become just another abuse surface. E.g. brigading, "downrank your competitor in the results" as a service, etc.)

Third, some people will probably block domains they shouldn't have blocked, and then have a bad user experience in future searches as the sites with genuinely best results is blocked. And then you're only left with only bad options: ignoring the users' stated preferences which they'll hate, or serving bad results that they'll also hate.

Can the feature work for a different search engine? Sure. For example, what if you have a paid search engine only used by power users and are looking for a simple to explain feature that people think they want to entice them to sign up? It'll be great for that. And if your entire user base actually loves and uses the feature? Well, it becomes a feature worth maintaining and expanding; it'll actually be a high quality ranking signal rather than something that's trivially gameable; etc.

[vkou]

I'm not trying to block domains from my search results because I'm afraid of spam. Google does a pretty good job of not putting spam in my search results.

I'm trying to block particular domains because I know the websites hosted on them are utter garbage, and better alternatives containing the same information exist.

[alwayslikethis]

You can use uBlacklist[1] and subscribe to custom made blacklists[2] for specific content.

1. https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist 2. https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist

[_0w8t]

It is hard to filter out SEO rubbish with a low rate of false positives. Spammers became really good at pretending to be real sites.

For mail spam various trust-based solutions like server black lists, domain verification etc. were important to solve the problem. But Google has little incentives to push for a trust-based search due to their business model.

[kursus]

> I mean that died decades ago when spammers just made pages with your word repeated over and over again. Spam makes everything worse.

No there was a long blessed period of time between the solving of spam and the introduction of altered results.

[acdha]

Only for the most simplistic implementations. More advanced implementations and incorporating page reputation took care of that pretty well for many years — Google’s quality decline started some time after they merged with Doubleclick in 2008 (notice how they haven’t done much innovative since?), and started allowing abusive sites like Quora or Pinterest to bypass policies against things like search cloaking, presumably due to things like large Ad Words purchases. All of the scam domains I see outranking legitimate results have tons and tons of ad impressions for Google.

[radium3d]

I agree, Google has gotten worse, I find more and more often lately I do not find what I am searching for. I try to change my question/wording and it just gets worse. I think their algorithm is failing. Did they lose their way? It used to supply useful information. I think they may need to reduce their reliance on website performance. Site performance does not equate good information. They are excluding the best information just because the site loads slightly slower. Sure, it's nice having a site load fast but that's not what I'm searching for. I want the best result slow or not. As a web developer I have had to spend a great deal of time optimizing sites and clients feel it's extremely important for SEO to have the fastest Google Page Speed score possible.

[xp84]

They probably didn't lose their way, so much as they slowly became less effective at combatting the exploits of black-hat SEO and the massive amount of complete garbage content farms out there, while simultaneously they have allowed the ad business to corrupt them completely, which deincentivizes them from showing good organic results because they sell more ads when it's hard to find the obvious things people want.

Your hypothesis on performance is interesting! I think someone altruistic thought "if we judge sites on this metric, everyone will be forced to do better" but they failed to realize that it's a hard problem at scale to NOT be a bloated mess (especially on the frontend! 'Let's add one more UI library, it's just 12MB!')

[SteveGerencser]

The whole site speed thing is purely a cost reduction on Google's part IMO. By convincing site owners that being fast is a ranking factor they can save millions in bandwidth costs as more and more people lighten their page load.

I have watched many web developers absolutely lost their mind trying to squeeze fractions of a second from their load time when there are far better ways to be using their time.

[Gigachad]

I’ve been going to ChatGPT first for most questions these days and then using google to verify. It’s easier to verify than find an answer from scratch. And often ChatGPT will rephrase my words to use the standard terminology for the topic which makes searching even easier.

To complete the cycle, ChatGPT just needs to be hooked up to verified sources on topics so it can show me exactly where what it says is proven true.

[pearl20]

Agreed. When searching at Google I can alteast decide which website I am going to trust as I can directly see the website URL and information there but with ChatGPT we don't have that advantage yet.

[elboru]

Same feeling, the other day I spent just too much time trying to find a chart comparing Messi against Ronaldinho. I mean two of the greatest players ever, how is it possible that I couldn’t find a good page, tons of SEO garbage pages.

[graeme]

Is this a good chart? First result for “Messi vs. Ronaldinho stats”

https://fbref.com/en/stathead/player_comparison.cgi?show_for...

Searching without stats had a lot of other stuff, but this was near top. And searching without stats shows broader potential interests.

[elboru]

I did check that table, the data is great, but the readability not so much (especially on mobile) the meaning of some column names was not clear (tooltip didn't work on mobile).

That's why I was looking for a chart (in the graphical sense), it amazed me that I didn't find one.

[graeme]

Hmm. Is it possible no one has made a good one? I searched for an infographic, came up dry. Usually have no trouble in domains I know well where

[Duplo]

> "inurl:reddit.com"

site:reddit.com would be slightly better :)

[afarviral]

I was wondering about that. Maybe they know something we don't using inurl. To catch subdomaims maybe?

[Jakawao]

Freakonomics recently did an episode on their podcast trying to answer this very question:

-Is Google Getting Worse? https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/

To their credit, Google actually participated in the episode.

[voytec]

> most of the time I have to input "inurl:reddit.com"

"site:reddit.com" should only include hostnames ending with "reddit.com", not URLs including "reddit.com" anywhere. Not sure if this still works though - haven't used Google Search for a few years now and I'm reading (even outside HN[1]) that it's getting worse.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20230107072330/https://www.ft.com...

[splittingTimes]

What do you use instead of Google?

[voytec]

A search engine I'm decreasingly fond of, so won't advertise.

I've tested alternatives mentioned in this thread and have no clear winner to point at.

[spaceman_2020]

Google is completely useless for any long tail query. All the results are so heavily optimized for broad, generic queries that you have no choice but to append Reddit.com or Stackoverflow.com to get specific, targeted answers.

[binkHN]

> For me, Google Search just doesn't seem to be getting better over the years, if anything its getting worse. I honestly feel like its hard to get what I want half the time with all the SEO spam...

Agreed, it's horrible and annoying. How are others doing improved searches?

[t0bia_s]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33668539

[PaulHoule]

When it comes to "ChatGPT is wrong about this one thing", a miss is as good as a mile.

The book Gödel, Escher, Bach has a set of dialogues between Achilles and the Tortoise over a record player that is an allegory for Gödel's theorem and other limits of computation. Hofstadter points out that it doesn't matter if you are doing computing with neural networks, tinker-toys, lasers, whatever.

The concept of "the truth" is problematic in many ways, in that one can make statements like "This statement is not truthful", call a social media site "Truth Social", put a label like "The Truth is out There" on the intro of the X files, etc. Being able to talk about "the truth" probably erodes our ability to know the truth.

Thus "the truth" is not something that comes in a can that you can paint onto a model, trying to close what looks like a little gap (in some ways it is a little gap) is like pushing a bubble around underneath a carpet.

[naturedivine]

An interesting point is then that we don't need specifically Google search engine. Any search engine will do.

[2342346666]

> if anything its getting worse.

It's gotten a lot worst and it will probably get replaced by GPT4 or its successor.

[mizzao]

your first point (about both the crappiness of search, and Reddit) reminds me of this earlier post: https://dkb.io/post/google-search-is-dying

[tmaly]

I am finding for code searching Google does well, but I use ddg for everything else.

[retinaros]

google is an advertisement company not a search one. and chagpt as soon as they start to be in the business of search engines will be one too. that is the fate of any tool that is free to use

[xp84]

The notion that every information service should be free with ads is one of the main poisons that have made the cesspool that is the net today. Imagine how different the incentives would be if Facebook and Google just made money by making their endusers happy enough to keep their memberships active with a small monthly fee. Their customers would be the end users, instead of being the advertisers.

[Denzel]

Reality doesn’t lend support toward your arguments. I assume you’re from a first-world country, based upon your comment.

- Google’s 2022 revenue was $250B. (We’ll assume that’s all ads.)

- 8B people in the world; we’ll assume only 4B people have internet access to the web.

How much would Google have to charge to break even?

$250B/yr / 4B people = $62.5/yr/person = $5/month/person

What does the world income distribution look like? [1]

60% of the world population survives on < $10/day ($300/month) for their household (multiple people).

We expect more than half the world’s population to pay more than 2% of their income for a single service? To put that in a first-world perspective, that’s $100/month for someone earning $60k; $200/month for someone earning $120k; etc. Does the average American spend that amount of money per month on a single web service?

Well of course, you may say, let’s charge more for those who earn more so we can ease the pain on those who earn less! That sounds great in theory, but once again, how many people do you know dropping $200/month on a web service even if they can afford it?

Back to two of your points:

1. “Imagine how different the incentives would be” - Yes, imagine, only the wealthy would have access to state-of-the-art search for the web and other services, further increasing the disparity between the two groups. Consider, maybe, that ads represent one of the greatest wealth transfers in our history. One perspective to consider is that the rich (advertisers) are subsidizing the poor (information access) via ads. That sounds like a net positive to me?

2. “Keep their memberships active with a small monthly fee” — YouTube premium exists. What do you think the uptake is on that? YouTube has provided immeasurable benefit to people across the world in the form of knowledge, resources, training, etc. Yet people would sooner reach for an ad-blocker than pay the “small monthly fee” even in nations as rich as the U.S.

What causes you to believe that people will pay even more than that for Google’s other services?

Disclosure: I work for Google. The opinions and data represented in this post are my own, and not representative of my employer.

[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/07/21/are-you-in-...

[CuriousSkeptic]

First if all, thanks for that argument, haven’t considered the math in this perspective before. Will need to let this simmer a bit.

One immediate flaw though, you starting premise is that the current revenue is needed to break even on such a service. Is there an argument to support this claim as well?

[Denzel]

I’d call it an assumption, not so much a flaw. :) We can make other assumptions.

To break even, Google would at least need to cover their expenses. Google had $200B in expenses for 2022, with a net profit of $50B. So, that won’t really change the math.

Especially when we consider the fact that the take-rate would be much less than 100%. Maybe 5-10% is a fair take-rate assumption? (Seems fair since YouTube has roughly 50M paid subscribers on 1B MAUs, 5%, from the public data I’m seeing.)

At 5-10% take-rate, the service would cost 10-20x more to break even ($50-$100/month on average) which would be a nonstarter for the global middle class and lower.

One could make the argument then for Google to lower its costs in an effort to lower the consumer’s price, but then we must realize this runs opposite of innovation. Investment is necessary for innovation, and profits are necessary for investment. Without profits, there’s no more innovation.

[moneywoes]

Does that google figure include YouTube?

[freediver]

Fantastic insights with a few suggesstions that I'd like to propose.

> - Google’s 2022 revenue was $250B. (We’ll assume that’s all ads.)

> How much would Google have to charge to break even?

Google also had $80B in pure profit which means break even point is $170B. That includes nearly 200K employees. It is reasonable to assume that running a search operation, especially one that does not require any ad sales personel, would require much less people and infrastructure. I will be generous and assume 50k people needed to provide search service. That means ~$45B in cost needed to break even, or 5 times less than your starting point.

So the new math becomes: $50B/yr / 4B people = ~$1/month/person

Much more doable.

> - 8B people in the world; we’ll assume only 4B people have internet access to the web.

> What does the world income distribution look like? [1]

> 60% of the world population survives on < $10/day ($300/month) for their household (multiple people).

It is also reasonable to assume that the most of those which do not have access to internet, belong to the <$10/day income group. So most of 4B with web access woud be able to pay $1/mo for search, especially if the search results have their best interest in mind.

Since $1/month will suffice to cover the entire search cost, increasing that to just $2/mo that will be paid by the richest could also solve the problem of providing access to search to the poorest and get the other 4B people searching. Nice!

(btw I think this should not be a job of a private company, but goverments should provide public search engines, similar to public libraries, which are not providing the utility that they once did - but this is a whole another matter).

So I'd reckon it is doable.

> One perspective to consider is that the rich (advertisers) are subsidizing the poor (information access) via ads. That sounds like a net positive to me?

This would hold true only if the quality of such provided information is not affected by ads as a business model. However we now know that is not true, and quality of search has detoriated a lot in the last decade as documented by many discussions here. Simple reason is misalignment of incentives between the users and the search engine, and this will be the case as long as the provided search results are paid for by the advertisers, and not by the users. So what is really the value of information provided, if it does not have my best interest in mind?

> Yet people would sooner reach for an ad-blocker than pay the “small monthly fee” even in nations as rich as the U.S.

That is correct, but at least YouTube Premium exists (unlike Google Premium), giving an opportunity for people who don't want ads to pay, opportunity that 25 million people took, paying a $12/month subscription [1]. Drop that down to $1/mo and maybe YouTube will not need to run ads? So if anything, this just proves the point of viability of this as a business model. Furthermore, 800 million devices having an adblocker installed already, make it the largest protest against a business model in the human history.

Disclosure: I work for Kagi, a paid search engine. I absolutely admire the search technology Google built (that we use) and people that work there (who we work with). I also believe that the days of the ad-supported business model for search are over, and in the future (~10 years) this will exists only with a 'for entertainment purposes only' label, because that will most accurately describe the level of trust we can have in the information served by this business model.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1261865/youtube-premium-...

[Denzel]

Thanks for taking the time to put together a well-reasoned argument. I had adopted some of your assumptions in a follow-up response to my other reply. [1] While I don't disagree with the perspective you've provided, in fact some points make a lot of sense, I think it misses the forest for the trees.

My point-by-point response should be read respectfully, since you've taken the time to do the same, I do not mean to sound argumentative. :)

> It is reasonable to assume that running a search operation, especially one that does not require any ad sales personel, would require much less people and infrastructure.

This is a reasonable assumption for running a steady-state business, but I challenge the worldview. Google does not exist in a vacuum without competitors, and contrary to what most outsiders believe, we're constantly iterating, innovating, and improving on Search alone to provide a better product and compete with our competitors. Google can't rest on its laurels.

A lot of laymen take Google Search's progress as inevitable, but I can assure you it's not. Consider the example of YouTube Snippets in Google Search. That feature was created within the last 5 years. The average person has used and found value in that new feature. (Both anecdotally and quantitatively.) That wasn't an easy feature to ideate, create, develop, or deliver. It took a lot of effort by a lot of smart people.

That's just one new feature. Google Search has been delivering several new features consistently.

Therefore I disagree with this assumption. If Google Search chose to run in steady-state, it'd soon find itself dethroned.

> That means ~$45B in cost needed to break even, or 5 times less than your starting point.

No, the financials don't work this way. [2] GOOG's Cost of Revenue is 50% Revenue. Cost of Revenue is your infrastructure, your financial floor, you can't go below this cost. Employees are accounted for under Operating Expense, specifically, your Sales under SG&A ($35B) and engineers under R&D ($35B).

So, if you'd like to banish all salespersons, you'd only save $35B. (Of which Ad Sales is only a part because Google sells many other things.)

> It is also reasonable to assume that the most of those which do not have access to internet, belong to the <$10/day income group.

This is not a reasonable assumption. Many people surviving on < $10/day have a low bandwidth cellular connection that they utilize for their family. Hence why Google innovated here with offline maps and landmark map directions for families that can only spare a little bit of bandwidth to calculate their route, and then make their way there without online point-by-point directions.

> quality of search has detoriated a lot in the last decade as documented by many discussions here

HN is a unrepresentative sample of the world population with respect to wealth, income, knowledge, interests, etc. I wouldn't consider HN as documentation for this. In fact, once again, the real-world data disagrees with HN's characterization.

> YouTube Premium exists (unlike Google Premium), giving an opportunity for people who don't want ads to pay, opportunity that 25 million people took, paying a $12/month subscription. So if anything, this just proves the point of viability of this as a business model.

That proves a 5-10% take-rate from YouTube's MAU. :) Which changes the break-even math on delivering a service. With a 5-10% take-rate on "Google Premium", your price must be 10-20x higher.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34301742

[2]: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG/financials?p=GOOG

[spaceman_2020]

I don’t think I will ever pay for Google but I will happily pay for ChatGPT, and good money too.

The amount of time it has saved me looking up documentation is worth hundreds of dollars already

[s3p]

What do you mean by "the delta"? I understand what the greek symbol represents in certain contexts but can we just use plain english to explain what we mean?