If you say you'd pay for a search engine. Oof. Guys we used to just link useful things at the end of our blog posts and on our myspace pages. Then search engines came in and we didn't have to. Then they killed the SEO placement of blogs. Now you can't find anything useful unless you try their AI. The whole business model is convincing us we need them while they make the internet less efficient to scroll through.
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I understand why you would pay and can respect it. But access to an organized and searchable internet is something closer to a right than a privilege, in my mind.
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… do you think MySpace came before search engines?
Replace Myspace with Geocities and it's broadly correct of my experience in 90s internet.
There were a ton of search engines in the 90s around the same time Geocities was released. AskJeeves was probably the most popular, but there was Altavista, Lycos, Dogpile, Yahoo… Shit, Google came out in 97, which was only a few years after Geocities.
When I had my Geocities website, I used Webcrawler as my preferred search engine. Cute spider and spiderweb iso/logo. Then came Altavista (altavista.digital.com, it was at first) and I switched. It brought more and better results. Somehow I never liked Lycos. And Yahoo, the first years, was a categorised catalogue/guide, kinda curated, and you had to submit a site to be considered to be added. You had to choose under which category (and subcategory, quite often) it should be listed. Also, at first, it wasn't Yahoo.com, it was buried in some .edu (or .ac, I don't quite recall) URL.
Webrings ftw
You just dated the hell out of yourself, but also showed how young you are at the same time.
Haha, I'm too young to really have lived it, I'm only 26 so… I did experience the start of Facebook and Twitter. I'm very glad people who did live through it are expanding on it.
Yeah it sounds like you got online right when Web 2.0 was starting to really kick off. Back before then we did have search functions, though they were pretty primitive compared to what they've become now (and also before they went to shit with excessive SEO and advertising). Web 2.0 really marked the emphasis towards UX design and social network functionality within web sites/design, though people had links on their personal pages well before all that.
Google is not a search engine. It's an advertising service. Their whole business model revolves around a critical mass of eyeballs, which flock to free services. This will never happen for the average user.
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I wonder what happens when the time finally comes and they realize infinite growth is impossible. Black Friday II?
If anyone ever figures out how to charge people service fees in the afterlife … there will be service fees in the afterlife
As the saying goes- if the service is free, you’re not the customer.
Eh, they're turning Youtube into that and yet people buy premium so I would be careful to make any such predictions.
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Pretty much https://kagi.com/ but outrageous
Isn’t their pricing per month not per query?
$5 for 300 queries. $10 unlimited.
They only changed that about a week ago, it used to be $10/1000 queries. Not that I'm complaining - I'm on that tier!
Yeah. i have seen I think in their FAQ that plan and confused me a bit. Moving from DDG to Kagi
The cheapest plan also has query limits.
How is it outrageous to pay for a product? There are obvious reasons and benefits. Go use a free one then. No need to bash a good product because you don’t want it.
I never said Kagi is, I said Google would be if they applied the pricing model.
Kagi is like google was 10 years ago though, useable and useful, while Google has morphed an SEO trashcan. I wouldn't pay them any amount for current quality
I'm down for the concept, but the pricing on Kagi is also pretty steep. $5/month for 300 searches? $10 unlimited. I have no doubt there are serious costs involved in providing search, but for a layman like me it feels way more than it should be. Does google even make $120/user/year on search, or even $60?
Anywho, I'd give it a go if it were cheaper, else, I'd rather be lightly advertised to on DuckDuckGo
Eventually I will use the trial of it. I don't feel like I actually do that many searches, and most are me looking up Pokemons while I play the games. So 300 searches per month doesn't actually sound too bad, I can do my least important searches like my game ones on DDG.
Actual Internet funeral
I'm not sure you you understand how Google makes money…which would tell you why this would never happen.
I thought I understood how Twitter made money
Twitter didn't make money though.
I'm still wondering how they valued it at $44 billion before the purchase.
Elon Musk cut them a check for that price.
I think you understood, but Elon didn't 🤣
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It's a great mystery that nobody knows of. Shhh, don't tell anyone!
I'd pay for google if they didn't steal my data.
Bluff called
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Because, why would anyone pay money to Google for Kagi? Duh!
For whatever reason, mentioning Kagi brings downvotes.
Edit edit: y'all are just oh my goodness! le heckin internets for everyone!!
Yeah that's the dillema with many freemium services. I would pay for them if it didn't instantly deanonymize me.
I very specifically made a deal with the devil to trade my data for data on a vast array of subjects. That's one of the sacred covenants of the internet. Don't break the covenant, Google!
searxng/startpage
Searxng is awesome
Don't give them ideas lol
Ai uses so much energy, it's not impossible
This is literally how their search API works. Except the limit is more like 25 queries a day and the price would be closer to $40/mo for average user's usage.
Just to clarify. The API pricing is 100 requests per day for free and $5 for every 1000 requests over that. But, the API is limited to 10 items per request. Their own UI provides up to 100 results per page (the setting seems to be hidden now, but is still active for users who set it before), which would require multiple requests to match, plus an image and/or video carousels each of which require an additional query, opening images tab preloads 50 images just to fill the screen, which is 4 more requests minimum for any image search, and, given how clicking each image also loads a bunch of related images, the estimate of 4 requests per search is very conservative. I use search on average about 80 times a day, and, doing the math, it would cost me on average $33.48 per month to do my searches using their API instead of using the free and unlimited official UI. This is ridiculous. And then twitter and reddit did exactly the same thing, too.
DuckDuckGo is not really much better. And it uses Bing as a backend. Gone are the days of reliable search engines.
Or DuckDuckGo, ecosia, bing, askjeeves, nexislexis, Qwant, altavista…
altavista
wow, I had no idea it still existed! I don't think I've used it since it was altavista.digital.com
edit: it doesn't, it's just yahoo search now
I thought the same about askjeeves, can’t believe it made it this long
Damn! This talk of forgotten search engines made me realise that dogpile.com is still alive! I dimly recall using it before Google's rise to power.
What happened to lycos?
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What a blast from the past. I remember using Lycos in my school's computer room. That was almost 25 years ago.
Lycos Mail was the very first example of email I ever saw. It blew my mind when I was a small kid.
ever try the duckduckgo app? I didn't realize it existed until now.
II'm usually on firefox with adblocker, and just use duck as my default search, so the app seems unnecessary. willing to try it out tho
Yeah, it’s just a private browser. I use it along with Firefox.
Yes, I use it on iOS (sometimes).
I've recently started paying for unlimited searches over on Kagi, and I'm very happy with the results so far. I'd gladly pay if it meant less search cruft and higher result quality, but sadly Google's just been going downhill for quite a while now.
Its a big black box with an unquantifiable improvement in quality, and I have no particular inclination to sign of for yet another subscription service. Particularly when I already watch my existing services creep up in price year after year.
That's before I even get into shit like standard utilities. My electricity bill last month was $500, almost entirely based on the Texas AC bill. Bro, who has another $10/mo to spend on Newoogle when I'm maxed out just keeping the lights on?
Electric companies need to be taken to task it's getting stupid. Every year they whine about how the infrastructure can't handle our load and tell us to sweat it out during the hottest part of the day. Then, they raise the prices with the excuse of fixing it all and never do. It's fucking criminal
Electric companies need to be taken to task it’s getting stupid.
They'll never be taken to task, because the profits they generate go back into the political system that made them into a cartel to begin with. And efforts to break up the cartel often result in an increased dedication to organizing and opposing anti-trust practices. Its a system that Nassim Taleb might describe as "anti-fragile".
I truly believe we can get there eventually if we just keep trying. The world is better off without us so it's really a win/win no matter what happens lol
It's unquantifiable, yes, possibly even placebo at times, but I think of it as paying for the features on top of search. I particularly find being able to create and adopt a search "lens" / focus and the ability to (de)prioritise domains very useful for my situation and needs.
That being said, I totally agree with your sentiment. I also only have limited subscriptions I can practically maintain, and I feel like this one's earned it's place well enough. To each their own I guess.
So all they'd need to get you to pay is to lower the current quality of search results and add a shop option to restore it for $10?
Best thing I paid for since fastmail.
Fucking do it, I dare you.
bro did you make that meme?
Genius!
wait, what? is Google actually a paid service now or is this a meme./?
Is a meme. Google would kill their business model if they did this. Their whole model is to collect data from user searches and then make money off it.
I'm pretty sure they get more money from people freely giving them data using a lot of their services (maps, search) than they'd get if they gatekept searching with a, subscription that people opted out of.
You're 100% right. Last I heard, Google makes about $300 per person every year from the data it collects on us.
… But I honestly think it's just a matter of time before the capitalist cook the golden goose and try to grab subscription bucks anyways.
that would be great actually
it will be when it gets bought by Musk
