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Comment by njarboe | Hacker News Reader

I would pay at least $10 a month for a good search engine, like google when it first started. Maybe that web is gone, so it could not work, but in the old days one could copy almost any error message and get a great explanation of the problem. I bet at least a million other people would too. Maybe $10 million a month in revenue could support a user focused search engine?

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Whenever anyone talks about business ideas, there's always some person that says "Oh, well I will pay so much for it!" and when you implement...they don't pay. That's probably been the downfall of many a web service when they realize its cheap for a person to say that they might pay so much for something, but hard for them to open their purse when it's time.

What's key to selling? Is it to pander to customer's wants? or make something so good to make it practically a need that money means little and customers will gamble?

I agree that the vast majority won't pay. 99% of people won't pay for news. 1% will pay for the WSJ or New York times. 0.001% pay $24,000 per year for a Bloomberg terminal. I think search engines could differentiate similarly. Maybe they have and I just don't know about the good paid options.

Google search earns over $138,000,000 per day. Best of luck outgunning them.

Source?

Google made $79B from ad revenue in 2016[1]. $79B in a year / 365 days per year = 218M per day. So GP underestimated by quite a bit.

Or put another way: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=google+ad+revenue

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-reven...

(Brought to you by Google Search: so ubiquitous it has become it's own meme.)

is "making per day" profit or revenue?

Revenue

If I had a hot dog cart and sold $500 worth of hot dogs, but the hot dogs cost me $100, to me, that's not making $500.

You don't need to beat Google on revenue. You just need to make enough to cover costs and retain enough talent to keep improving your search engine.

that's hardly "beating" Google, or even DDG for that matter

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