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Comment by schoolornot | Hacker News Reader

If the fees were reasonable, fine. But I remember getting charged "8 cents" a page for search results, even for queries that yielded no results. The "No Results Found" page... 8 cents.

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It gets even worse than that. Many pages are charged by the number of results or the length of the page generated. But you don't know the price until you load it and see how long the page is. Most have a cap of $3, but some don't, so when you press that button to load the next page, sometimes it just costs $100 and you really had no way to know it'd happen until it did. PACER is terrible.

There's even a warning that you should make sure to make your query as specific as possible, because if you screw up and it returns 100 pages, sucks to be you.

There's basically 0 chance this would be legal if you're a private company.

> There's basically 0 chance this would be legal if you're a private company.

In the USA it would absolutely be legal and you would be bound by a binding arbitration clause and a non-disclosure + non-disparagement clause.

You might even be bound by a license / ToS which prevents you from comparing the capabilities of that system against a better system[1].

[1] https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2018/05/the-dewitt-clause-...

This is what we call the "Visit the emergency room" business model, totally legal.

Ouch, good point.

If the fees were reasonable, fine. But I remember getting charged "8 cents" a page for search results, even for queries that yielded no results. The "No Results Found" page... 8 cents.

Reminds me of the pre-internet days, when online access was charged by the minute. You'd better be damned sure you knew exactly what you were looking for before you connected to CompuServe, The Source, Delphi, or whatever.

I think today, people don't grok what a miracle it is that in many circumstances they can just aimlessly "surf" the internet and not get any incremental charges.

It's not a "miracle". Being charged per minute was efficient because you were tying up a cost-time based resource (a phone line). People don't like it because they have to keep track of another dimension of cost, but we still have parallel costs with cell phones and ISP connections (either by usage time or by transfer size-time).

You won't actually get charged if your search volume and page views are low. It is still dumb that basic functionality is nickel and dimed like it's some sort of 70's timeshare.

Haha that's terrible. When was this?

It's now.

It’s really interesting to see people in general confront the actual costs of computing when they’re charged for asking a question. The reaction is, universally, “how dare you charge me for zero results”, as though it’s free to search for an answer - as if the time and money spent on performing that search must be given for free to all askers.

Most providers bury this cost in their revenue model and hide it from users. While PACER is probably charging more than is necessary, they’re definitely not burying it, and I’m honestly quite happy to see that.

There is an interesting parallel in that common and widespread reaction that match issues we’ve seen with essential workers during the pandemic, where for example a customer will say “Why should I wear a mask? There’s no one in here!”, somehow failing to recognize the worker as a human being in the process.

So, to translate the PACER pricing objection into the human equivalent, I present a question:

Do human librarians deserve to be paid a wage for performing a search that finds no results, or should their wages be docked if they can’t find anything?

>as though it’s free to search for an answer

The entire economic system of the Internet is built on the fact that the marginal cost of every action is essentially $0. It's certainly no where remotely close to 10 cents. More like 10 millionths of a cent.

I think the problem is user fees for a system that is supposedly funded by the entirety of society so we can ensure fair process. If you have to pay for literally nothing, it rankles. Instead, the system should just be funded by taxes like (most of) the courts themselves. Perhaps there could be user fees for extremely high usage, but $10 seems like an extremely low bar for $0.08 per page. The system as it exists appears to simply discourage the public from getting too nosy in the workings of the courts.

I think it should be more like the post office or public transit, where a nominal fee is charged (or none at all) but that fee is not the primary source of funding. Small fees are very effective at limiting the human tendency to abuse anything offered at $0. I agree that the current fees are higher than is necessary to prevent abuse - and I think it should be free to taxpayers.

A library card is typically a flat fee, and you can perform as many 'searches' as you want. In a bookstore, you can ask the clerks if they have books on a particular topic, and they will show you their wares. You can browse covers and abstracts for free, to help you decide whether anything is worth purchasing. Wouldn't that be a better model for PACER to follow?

Or think of it this way... how often would you go to a library or bookstore that charged you simply for looking around (additional charges apply for each aisle you walk down)?

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