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by pkulak 1205 days ago
What I don't understand is this idea that searches cost them 1.2 cents each. 1.2 cents is the cost of operating a 4-core, 16-gig, 5-gigabit server on AWS for nearly 5 minutes. If a single search cost Google 1.2 cents, Google would be paying $44 million a day to cover it. I cannot make that math work, and it makes me reticent to believe them and continue paying.

Only thing I can think of, is that they have divided their entire operating costs by number of searches a day, and 1.2 cents is not really the marginal cost of a new search, which is _super_ dishonest.

2 comments

> If a single search cost Google 1.2 cents, Google would be paying $44 million a day to cover it. I cannot make that math work, and it makes me reticent to believe them and continue paying.

You don't believe that Google is spending at least $44 million a day on providing search?

It's Bing API usage cost as they mentioned, and Bing hiked the prices up 100%, as they mentioned.

Most of their searches are combining data from Bing, Google and other sources.

They never stated that this cost is their infrastructure cost.