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Comment by l33tman | Hacker News Reader

I only browsed the article but had fond memories of how revolutionary AltaVista was when it launched. Suddenly you could browse the web without following links. This started a trend where you provided lesser and lesser value by stuffing links on your homepages (yes this was a thing) as people didn't need the links anymore.

Some years later I remember AltaVista suddenly became full of paid links and ads, to the point of unusability. This is when Google came in, with no ads, no paid links, and actual good search results.

The irony.. now Google fills at least half the first search page with paid for links and unusable results.

Unfortunately, nobody (in the long run) gives away something completely for free. I would pay $1-2/month for a search portal without paid links and no sell-off of my private info.

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Do you think $1-2 a month would really be enough? Something tells me Google makes more than $1-2 a month off me.

off of serving you ads specifically? I doubt it. Bulk ad targeting data is under 30c per person.

Source: https://ig.ft.com/how-much-is-your-personal-data-worth/

The estimated average Google search ad cost-per-click (CPC) is $2.69 [0].

Working on the conservative assumptions that an average person will run 10 searches a day and click on 1 search ad a day, Google will make $83.39 a month from the average user. It is likely much more though.

[0] https://valveandmeter.com/pay-per-click-statistics/

Their global ad revenue is a public figure right? It should be easy to estimate an average. If they have a billion users, do they actually have $100B in monthly revenue?

I highly suspect the distribution is not flat in any way though (some users are much much more valuable than others and it's why advertisers pay FB and Google to target the ads for them).

Interestingly enough, I just went to 'Google' that question [0] and got some very non-relevant info boxes:

https://imgur.com/a/J9U5ZwJ

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[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=google+ad+revenue

Averaging one click on a search ad per day per user is much higher than I would guess.

I would say that may be true for the average HN reader, but in my experience definitely not true for the average overall user.

Based on the linked study [0], 57% of people can't tell the difference between a Google ad and an organic search result.

[0] https://varn.co.uk/01/18/varn-original-research-almost-60-pe...

I've never clicked an ad in my life

How old are you?

Bear in mind that there is a vast amount of clicking on "wasted" adverts, i.e. paid adverts which would have been the top result of an organic search anyway, e.g. eBay spending $20M a year on ads targeting the keyword "eBay", which they thought was great because it appeared to give a $245.6m return on investment, until they switched it off for a bit and realised they got pretty much the same traffic and conversion rate without the massive advertising spend[0].

[0] https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h...

I never click on their ad links so it would be a pure bonus for them if I pay :) But yeah I don't know... sometimes the supply/demand curves never meet.

Still think the business opportunity for a really good paid-for search engine is there. Of course it's not trivial to make a search engine but as I feel Google's usability is in a falling trend, the bar is getting lower..

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