How much would you pay to keep using Google? | Hacker News Reader

How much would you pay to keep using Google?

economist.com

37 pointstchalla66 comments

"Search engines appear to be especially valuable: consumers surveyed said that they would have to be paid $17,500 to forgo their use for a year." So the title is using "Google" as a generic name for a search engine cf. Kleenex. Which is a pity because I really would like to know how much people would pay to stick with Google as opposed to another search engine, e.g. DDG. For me, this is next to nil!

i dont think it's misleading. People say "Just google it" instead of just search it. How many people know of DDG?

The person your replying to misunderstood it. I misunderstood it. The literal meaning of the title is not what it literally means. I think we should agree that it is misleading.

It's certainly misleading, but only to this audience, which is full of people who have opinions about Google versus other search engines.

It's not that misleading to the Economist's broader audience, which doesn't know of any reasons anyone would not use Google.

You don't think that's slightly patronizing?

I don't think of Google as primarily a search engine. It's a suite of services.

Most of their services require an account in some way, and I don't want to be tied to such a massive company.

Like most Google's services that you can use without an account, their search engine is pretty decent (although DuckDuckGo is my main search engine). Maps is decent too.

But I wouldn't pay to use any of Google's services. There are adequate libre alternatives now.

>I don't think of Google as primarily a search engine. It's a suite of services.

Right, you don't. But you are also on HN, implying you are tech-literate.

You know what my mom, Susie from accounting, Chad from marketing and Amy from sales think of Google as? Don't take my word for it, here just see what Oxford dictionary defines google [0] as.

I don't get HN sometimes. People think everyone is as knowledgable or tech-literate as people on here. Still remember that famous comment in Show HN: Dropbox thread about why would one need it.

[0]: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/google

Yes, I accept that other people see this company differently. I didn't say and didn't mean to imply that other people do or should see things the same way as me.

I think the difference might be linguistic: “to Google” has the search meaning for practically everyone, “to use Google” much less so.

Which is a pity because I really would like to know how much people would pay to stick with Google as opposed to another search engine, e.g. DDG

The question makes no sense to me. Everyone (outside of a tiny tech savvy minority) already uses Google, and they have to be paid nothing.

I think the intent was to ask how much people would pay for access to Google searches, assuming they have other search options that they wouldn't have to pay for. Not to ask how much would Google have to pay them to stick with Google.

Definitely not nil for me. DDG still seems to struggle at looking up basic programing related information. Is that not the case for you?

Not for me any more. If i don't find a result i want the first time, i just add a !so and then it searches only stackoverflow.

DDG used to be much better half a year ago; recently they seem to have adopted "I know better than you what you want to search for" from Google and often even "" doesn't return anything useful until you start adding "-" to any terms that are out of whack.

Friends at DDG, if you read this, please return back to what you had before, aping the leader with its warts is not going to make you more competitive, but definitely less useful.

Unfortunately, they are right most of the time that they know better. But it is sad that something gets ruined catering to people who can't properly formulate keywords.

I've been using DDG for a few years now and I have the reflex to immediately add "!g" after a query if I don't find what I'm looking for in the first screen of results. Nowadays I notice more and more that when DDG doesn't find what I'm looking for then google often doesn't either. I think the duck is pretty mature now, at least for my use cases.

That being said I don't fool myself, DDG is free which means that if it ever becomes really mainstream it's going to turn "evil" at some point in order to monetize the users one way or an other. Let me pay for your bloody service, add a few gizmo premium features if you have to. I want to be the client, not the product.

People forget that Google was an enormously profitable business even when the tracking part of its operation was in its infancy. Search ads sold by intent will always be valuable

The bang-notation still irks me, it's like it is negating the g to indicate 'not Google results'

For me, the urge to "!g" has considerably weakened over the last few months (I've switched to DDG as daily driver about a year ago). So either they got a lot better in that time, or the subconscious part of my brain that composes search queries is gradient-descending into a local optimum without me noticing.

DDG is almost as bad as cuil at least for German results. Endless spam and irrelevant things.

Works for me. I only use other search engines in like 10% or searches.

Whenever I use a search engine other than Google and I don’t get the results I want my thought is “I bet Google would have found it”. When I use Google and I don’t get the results I want my thought is “I probably didn’t type the right query for this”. For me this is the biggest challenge any time I’ve tried something else.

> One way to quantify how much these internet services are worth is by asking people how much money they would have to be paid to forgo using them for a year.

This would inspire much larger numbers than "how much would you pay to use this service if no free alternatives were available"

Maybe this is a form of loss aversion? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion

"How much protection money would you pay google to not: (1) track you on just about every site you visit, (2) know exactly where you are at all times because of that little GPS you carry around with you, (3) tie-in your purchases from brick and mortars to identify what you like to buy, (4) maintain a full history of things you have been interested in (searched for) so they can market stuff to you"

For #1, I am hoping that the tracking blocker plugin I use has already done this.

For #2, I've tried disabling the tracking stuff on my phone and it basically completely hamstrings the device's built-in assistant to the point of being useless. So I don't know a way around this one.

For #3, "May I have a phone number or email for your purchase?" "No, you may not."

For #4, I've disabled search history to the best of my knowledge, but I don't for one minute think they are not still using it internally.

I would not pay Google. I would switch to a search engine of comparable quality that sells ads based upon what was immediately searched for, and not based upon their tracking and identification scheme. I like the idea of DuckDuckGo but I haven't gotten the same quality yet.

Would Google have reached today's size if it had charged from day one?

I would gladly pay for Google Search as I can't do my job without it. But what additional features would they offer when 1) there's growing privacy concerns and legislation coming (so not using your personal data isn't doable and/or will be required anyway) and 2) they pretty much offer everything for free today (and it'd be a downgrade if they downscale free users and made people pay for something they already get for free!).

It's a tough spot to be if you're thinking about an alternative to ads.

I would gladly pay for Google Search as I can't do my job without it.

We programmed before Google. And it was more fun and satisfying too. A real craft, not a cut’n’paste-fest

$17.5k/year for Google? I'd probably go more. I can't even fathom how much it'd hamstring me professionally to not be able to use Google.

really? you wouldn't just buy a few hundred dollars worth of books like we did back in the day before search?

I'd survive but I wouldn't go back to it except in the most dire of circumstances.

I'm imagining a bumper sticker saying "I'd rather wing it than Bing it!" Google is an invaluable tool for me, too.

$10/month with zero tracking & ads, and end-to-end encryption.

By end-to-end encryption are you just talking about HTTPS in this situation?

GMail like ProtonMail/Tutamail with proper asymmetric crypto. GDrive with the possibility to encrypt on the client side even if it hurts de-duplication (maybe for extra $).

See: virtru

Full disclosure: I work there but I work there because they do this. I left my last place because I wanted to be on this side of the argument.

I'd rather keep the 120 a year and allow tracking.

something's not right about this survey

>Survey respondents said that they would have to be paid $3,600 to give up internet maps for a year

is the convenience of internet maps over satnav, desktop offline maps (they used to be a thing!), and paper maps really worth thousands of dollars? and what about the $17k figure for forgoing google? that's more than half the us adult median income! surely google isn't that convenient. I'm guessing they either surveyed very affluent people, or the respondents greatly overestimated

I don't think that number is overly large.

Take a question like "how much would you have to be paid to use an outhouse for a year"? Sure, it would be inconvenient, but it not like it would monumentally change someone's life.

Still, I'd guess my number for the outhouse question would be over $50,000 possibly more.

Would it really? I think that just makes you out of touch, or really affluent, as said before.

Frankly, I'm willing to bet serious money that given the choice between 50,000 cash right now, and an in-door toiled, the vast, overwhelming, majority of the world would not choose the latter.

For me, yes. All the money in the world isn't worth it if my day to day life gets worse.

I don't think it's that I'm really affluent, but more than I value some things more than money. I have a roof over my head and food on the table, so outside of that my goal is to lead a happy life. I don't think a few tens of thousands of dollars would make me happier than using an indoor bathroom, or using Google does.

It's just that I don't think you realise that 50K is more than most people make in a year. For some people, even Europeans, it could easily mean doubling, or tripling their salary for a year. That's not just "a few tens of thousands of dollars", that's literally enough to ensure an easier life for a few years. Which is why I think you don't even realise it, but you're affluent (compared to world standards).

The title doesn't match the article ("Google" is not the same as "internet search engines").

If we're talking about Google specifically, zero, because I've been trying to un-googlify my life for a few years now and I'm comfortable enough with my alternatives. If all of Google shut down today, the only thing I'd really miss is Google Maps -- both for navigation and the ratings/review system.

What's wrong with Google trying to crowdsource its funding? Rather than show an ad to everyone for a fraction of a cent, maybe a fraction of users would be willing to pay a cent for each search, on average? I'd pay 500 cents a month to cover the nearly 10 daily searches I perform, if it meant that no one's data was being gathered and mined.

Have we reached a consensus that asking the question "how much would you pay to keep using Google" is an accurate method for deciding how valuable Google is to society?

To me it seems like a flawed and simplistic approach, which will always make Google seem more valuable than it actually is, because it assumes that in the absence of Google, no alternative products and services would have appeared into the world and provided more value than Google ever has. It frames the question as "Google or nothing".

Well considering I pay almost 50 a month for gsuite I’d say that.

I used Lexis before there was AltaVista, though I did not pay for it directly. I used AltaVista before there was Google. I'm confident I'd pay to continue using Google. $10/month would be a no-brainer, which is I think much higher than Google's current ARPU.

Who was the business genius who starved AltaVista? I don't mean who pulled the plug. I mean who under-resourced it so that, in it's final years, it was too late to compete with even a nascent Google.

The article isn't directly about privacy, but there is an implication about the value of your personal data. I'm not convinced that they'd stop abusing private information even if it were a paid for service. There are plenty of examples of privacy issues with subscription based services.

I already pay monthly for extra drive storage and I buy tons of media from Google Play. I donate to a few sites including wikipedia and khan academy. I wouldn't really mind paying a small fee for other google services such as gmail.

Ironically Google Search is probably the one product that could sustain itself on ads based only on what you put in that search field without any kind of tracking. I'm fine with Google Search ads like that.

That's how DuckDuckGo ads work.

Google has a record of our searches, our email, our contacts, most of the cellphones in the world, in some cases a microphone within our houses... and they also want money?

It’s not the same thing as “human” access, but, for bot acces, pricing is around $0.01 per request for a JSON access to search results. Ref: https://serpapi.com/#pricing

How much would you pay me to start using Google?

Zero. I am already 100% on DDG or Bing

For no ads/tracking, $50/mo.

I'd gladly pay $100-$200 annually for search as long as they stopped profiling and tracking me all over the web with their ads.

With $5/mo + a domain, so total of $72/y, you can use G apps for business.

I don't understand why I'm getting downvoted, it's a serious statement, you can already upgrade to get a service with the business ToS, which includes different privacy treatment.

Personally, other than my work email, I still have a business account from my previous startup when google apps was free. No ads, less tracking, a joy. My only regret is that as of today you can't enable Advanced Protection on the business accounts.

$99/mo

Free 99

Lol, a better question is "How much would you pay to eliminate google from your life forever." because why the hell would I ever give someone money to spy on my personal life?

This kind of thing really makes me question how capable people are of grasping how completely they are being exploited and taken advantage of. Google should be paying us for the use of our data. How did we get to this point where humans think it is their purpose to be juiced for money by faceless corporations until they die?

And now we can pay for the privilege!!! lol.

> because why the hell would I ever give someone money to spy on my personal life?

I think the idea is that if you were paying them, they wouldn't be spying on you because you've become the customer and not the product.

I think that idea has been proven wrong in every single application of it in the entire history of human activities. There is not a single example anywhere that anyone can point to, where someone afforded that level of trust lived up to their responsibilities.

I invite you to cite some examples which prove my hypothesis wrong. But history would suggest that we should never, ever, ever trust _anyone_ in that particular way.

I kind of like the status quo. I block all ads on all my devices and networks. So I get free services that are great.

So as far as I know, they don't really make any money off of me (probably some edge cases where they do), and while they are collecting data on me, I don't get served any ads based on that data.

This is of course not sustainable for Google, so I rely on the willingness of others to consume ads.

Of course this depends on what services we're discussing but for example, ad blockers and privacy badger cannot prevent Google from reading your E-mail contents. The only thing that can stop that is PGP, and it's not a coincidence that Google has refused to provide any built-in method of E-mail encryption. They know what they're doing. They know it's wrong. Inside they are laughing at their "users" who think they're getting any sort of value from the service.

Fact is, Google does not offer _anything_ that is not also offered by someone else, and often without all the exploitative policies.

Ya, but so what? They are reading my emails in order to serve me ads... which I will never see.

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