At a certain point, if you want a subscription service, why wouldn't you just do something like suscribe to Bloomberg News, then get all your news by going directly to their site rather than going through a search engine or aggregator. If you're looking at an aggregator, inherently you want to see many possible sources, including ones you may only read once a year. Nobody is going to subscribe to hundreds of separate sources individually just to read them once in a blue moon.
Ironically, the predatory and terrible academic journal industry is probably the only thing out there right now that comes close to getting this right. Rather than expecting anyone to subscribe to each journal individually, they give a bulk subscription to an entire publishing service that then grants access to many journals.
If someone out there offered a $20 a month service that granted access to Bloomberg, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, WaPost, Financial Times, all in one, I'd gladly buy that. But there is no way in hell I'm subscribing to all of those separately. Even if the aggregate price was cheaper, I wouldn't want to do that.
1. There is much paywalled information online that is not in the form of a subscription, but instead one-time fees.
2. Just because you paid at the paywall, doesn't mean you have to subscribe for life. You can pay to get the information you need and then instantly cancel any subscription.
> If someone out there offered a $20 a month service that granted access to Bloomberg, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, WaPost, Financial Times, all in one, I'd gladly buy that.
PressReader is pretty much this, although the price is $30 and not $20.
The obvious problem to this armchair expert "solution" is that Google doesn't know what I am already paying. I pay NYT for a subscription, but Google doesn't know that. For obvious privacy reasons users don't want to tell Google what sites they already have subscriptions with. And I don't even log in to Google to do a search so there's no place to store that information even if I actively wanted to provide that to Google.
I wasn't presenting it as a perfect solution. I was observing that many people don't want to see paywalled results, some may want to see all of them because they may choose to pay, some may want to see them because they plan to use a paywall bypass, and some as you pointed out may want to see the subset they already pay for but not others. As a first pass, a binary approach seems better than nothing, and is simpler to provide than a more complex user-subscription-specific solution.
I'd pay a little if we could get rid of the pop ups and cookie banners, advertisements and click bait content. But after 30 years we're still missing the infrastructure for micro payments.
For news sites and netflix we now have subscriptions shielded by paywals, which really is incompatible with hyperlinked sites or search engines. Even if you subscribed to 1000 services, the experience would probably be horrible. The internet was designed to be free, but evidently that's not a good business model if you want to make a living.
Micro payments only make sense if the intrinsic transaction costs are (near) zero. Like reaching for your wallet to pick a coin to give to a homeless person.
With trusted third parties or block chains, the transaction costs are unfortunately much, much higher, especially initially without proper scales economics.
It could be as simple for the user as a button in your web browser to donate or pay for the site currently open in your tab. And a third party intermediary that once a month collects payment/donations and distributes. The problem with Visa/MC is the minimum transaction fee of 10-25c
But a lot of work and planning would be needed to get anywhere with such an idea.
If I ask you what is the best restaurant in town, will you answer that it's your mommas house because there you always eat for free?
Cost has nothing to do with determining the quality of a search result, and search engines shouldn't discriminate against paywalled content. But I think it's a good idea to let users like you check a box to hide paywalled results.
There are millions of websites out there that are free for anyone to read, including this one! Restaurants that serve free meals are not the norm, so this analogy doesn't make a lot of sense. If every website was paywalled and required a subscription, like cable TV channels, then you might have a point.
People use search engines professionally and not only for entertainment. There is an icebergs worth of important and valuable information online behind paywalls, not only articles or news. Information workers use a search engine to find the information they need, pay the cost if it's paywalled, and then cancel any subscription after getting what they needed.
Long gone are the days of "surfing the web", when most of us spent our time online just randomly browsing around.
I don't see why there couldn't also be a professional search engine. Academics have Google Scholar which is an amazing resource for them. A search engine that brought up high quality resources for professionals would seem to be pretty useful. It could potentially even have a single subscription to unlock all of the sites in a network, rather than individual paywalls at every site.
We already have professional search engines, since they don't discriminate against paywalls. No need to change that. And there are so many fields of professionals, that you'd need a ton of different specialized search engines for that.
I've come to learn that many people on hacker news have an ethos of never paying for digital content or services. Most people here make an hourly salary of $20 or more in my estimate, yet they will spend days and days of their time to avoid paying $5 for something. So you spend $100-$200 of your time to save $5. What's the rationale?
It reminds me of my travels around the world, where I'd hang out with backpackers that would spend a long time in the supermarket looking for the cheapest noodles, instead of spending their time enjoying the exotic location they were in. Or spent half the day walking along the highway to a bus stop instead of taking a taxi that would cost $5.
I think it is fair that a search engine by default should be unbiased and look for the best result for the query, and not account for price or such.
No, I won't answer my mommas house because you can't just show up and eat there as a restauraunt. It doesn't fit the search criteria you asked for.
If you ask what the best restauraunt in town is, I'll give you a restauraunt.
If you ask what the best restauruant in town is, I won't send you to a place where you can buy a "best restauraunts in town guide" for 5 bucks, because that's not what you're asking for.
Ironically, the predatory and terrible academic journal industry is probably the only thing out there right now that comes close to getting this right. Rather than expecting anyone to subscribe to each journal individually, they give a bulk subscription to an entire publishing service that then grants access to many journals.
If someone out there offered a $20 a month service that granted access to Bloomberg, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, WaPost, Financial Times, all in one, I'd gladly buy that. But there is no way in hell I'm subscribing to all of those separately. Even if the aggregate price was cheaper, I wouldn't want to do that.