A few years ago my response to this would be that I'd gladly pay Google $10/year for access to Search without adverts, but over the past couple of years that's changed. Google have become so utterly terrible at handling customers that I no longer would. I'll only use Google services if they're free. The idea that Google might just kill my account without notice leaving me with no access to search would be catastrophic.
I would gladly pay a different search engine company for access to a good search service though.
So for less than a Netflix subscription you have Youtube, Gmail, Search, Drive, Translate, Calendar, Maps, Photos, Hangouts and more. Services that many people use regularly.
It wouldn't be hard to argue that any of these products is worth a lot more than $10 a year, but convincing users at large to go down that route will be a challenge, undoubtedly.
[1] https://mondaynote.com/the-arpus-of-the-big-four-dwarf-every...
(Also, many users would agree on the value but balk at redirecting funds from an existing allocation to continue service on something they've already gotten for free.)
The ad industry's biggest accomplishment is making most users believe that they can have access to state of the art search engine, video streaming, messenging etc... for "free". It means that it's incredibly hard to compete with a different business model.
Instead of google I am aggregating multiple search engines and joining the results eliminating all that are not on most of them. I am losing anything special (like there is something "special" today) but at least I dont get bunch of stuff on google that just wastes my time.
Nextgrid: yes, exactly that. I want old results, I want old content, I want content that matches with my search words 100% instead of getting what google crappy algorithms think that I want. I dont want hipster crap that propagates next silver bullet (that is just a copy what we already had packed into SaaS).
People on Hacker News seem to think Google's results have gotten worse over time. Maybe they have for the narrow set of interests and requirements of this crowd, but I'm very confident they've gotten better for the vast majority of other users (users who I bet are less likely to use an ad blocker too).
> That they eliminate all SEO crap (i dont want those results anywhere near the 100th page of results) and ads from my results and serve me relevant content.
This is an extremely difficult engineering problem. Google doesn't make a conscious decision to include low/middling quality SEO'd content. That content is optimized to appear relevant and high quality. Google does a better job than say Bing at telling the difference, but it's still obviously an unsolved problem.
- Hosts commercial advertising content (not the entire web; only product and service offerings)
- Charges for hosting
- Has a highly qualified audience that genuinely wants to receive relevant advertising (based on requests being user-initiated, not software-initiated)
- Claims credit for revenue generated as a result of providing relevant advertising
... then you're likely to be able to cover the costs of developing and maintaining the system.
- This is a bit like eBay or Amazon, arguably; except that the user profile and context is optional for the user to provide
- Addictive products could still be a loophole that bad advertisers could exploit to monetize users without providing them overall benefit; fortunately local regulations tend to cover that
It does actually cost money to operate a good search engine.