[igurari]

That's certainly a reasonable perspective, and one I take very seriously. (And to be clear, I didn't mean to suggest that services should be based on a la carte pricing instead of subscriptions.)

From a long-term industry perspective, though, I think there are several reasons not to try to milk money out of search (and I think any company that is serious about dislodging Wexis should think hard about these): # In the short term it's a competitive advantage. Free is better than absurdly expensive or even relatively cheap. That competitive advantage may be enough to get very significant traction. Also, Google Scholar is already free, so paid offerings need to be substantially better than that. # Search is a gateway, and its a sticky one at that. For many (most?) people, Google is how they enter the internet. Google has built internet dominance out of search. Having people on your site multiple times a day provides a great opportunity to earn trust and layer on additional services. # Search is ultimately a low yield service. Once finding information gets easy (and everyone will be reasonably good at it in the legal space in 5-10 years), evaluating which is the best bit of information will become the main problem. For example, it's not hard to get a listing of all the restaurants in an area; but figuring out which one I'd like best is far trickier and something I'd pay for. Network effects will help with that, so getting large numbers of users is important. # The future of legal research (5-10 years out) is in analytics and AI, not search. So the race will be won by whoever produces high quality products in those areas first. # Web based services tend to be dominated by a single winner that achieves network effects (e.g., Google, Amazon, Facebook) and I expect legal research will be the same. So second place probably still means that you fail.