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by chongli 1089 days ago
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.
1 comments
carlosjobim 1089 days ago
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.

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chongli 1088 days ago
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.
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carlosjobim 1088 days ago
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.

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