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quanto

Could one do a back-of-the-envelope calculation on a user acquisition cost for Google?

15b USD/year / 500 m users = 30 USD/user/year

3 searches/user/day = 1000 searches/user/year

30 USD/user/year / 1000 searches/user/year = 0.03 USD/search

AFAIK, 0.03 USD per search (or impression) is in the right ballpark for advertising.

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Data used (retrieved from Google) 446m Safari users. An average user searches on Google 3 - 4 times per day.

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If only I could pay Google $30 / year to opt out of their data collection schemes.

I’m fairly sure a lot of folks would sign up at even $30/month, if any product managers are reading this.

This would be an interesting product especially to those who are relatively price insensitive such as companies.

One of the perks of working for us is a google no-ads subscription! could work?

I suspect that what people want with "No data collected" is too nebulous to be actionable, at $30/ month or any price. Youtube Premium is something actionable, "I don't want adverts". OK then, no adverts, done for the price.

If you try to take it literally it blows up immediately. Who aren't we collecting data about? We can't very well have data like login credentials for a user we don't collect data about, so...

I would pay a lot more than 30

Give me back the advanced search operators and I'm in for 3 figures/month.

Sort of reminds me how I can’t get a digital newspaper without ads, regardless of what I’m willing to pay, or how every cable tv provider in my region has unskippable ads in on demand and (soon) recorded tv programs, regardless of what I pay. The content industries are very much stuck in a “content must be financed through advertising” mindset, and google seems trapped with them. I can easily imagine a paid privacy-first google premium service that strips out google ads across the internet, and I would pay for it, but apparently google’s imagination is more limited. So now I just use ad blockers.

Yeah, that's an average though. If you don't hesitate about spending $30, you're probably worth a lot more to advertisers.

If you have disposable income to spend $30 on an internet service, it's likely you also have a mortgage. Mortgage search ads alone are around $10 a click IIRC.

With 75% gross margin, it would bring the opt out price to $120/year. Would you still want to opt out at that price?

Here. [1] I saved you $30 a year.

[1] "Turn Web & App Activity on or off" https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/54068?co=GENIE.P...

Isn't this one of those sneaky "we'll still harvest your data we just won't save it to your account activity viewer" type deals?

What evidence could I or anyone else offer that would convince you?

I'm not trying to be a jerk, I'm genuinely curious what you think could convince you. Perhaps you could get a job at Google and investigate the relevant code?

This came from documents unsealed in Google v. Oracle.

Opting out of that doesn't mean Google stops tracking you. Only some parts of its machinery stop. Even Google's own employees have no idea which parts collect which data.

To all those downvoting, read yourselves https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/08/unredacted-suit-...

I'm not this does anything for privacy though. In my tin-foil hat mode, I think they take your data and use it how ever they want. If you have this enabled, they do these "local to you" type of things, and if it is disabled then it goes to the main search. However, that does not prevent them from saving that data linked to you in another table/database. It just means you no longer get the "benefit", but you never prevent Googs from benefiting.

Might be skewed a bit by the fact that iPhone users are generally more affluent.

I can't recall the source of how much Google makes per CPM on average, but it's significantly higher than all other search engines. If the deal is cheap/value for anyone, it's Google. It may have been in the UK CMA report on search/online advertising, IIRC it was between $30 and $50 CPM with Bing on around half that.

If my arithmetic is right, 1.5bn searches would increase DDG's number of searches 15 fold. It would seem only Bing is potentially capable of putting in a bid similar to Google's.

Until DDG starts serving results from their own index, they are essentially a privacy-branded Bing.

My digging indicates that Apple has 1.65B active devices as of Q1 2021. The vast majority (1B) are iPhone users, and I suspect the vast majority of iOS users use Safari.

Sounds like Google is getting a pretty good deal.

Every iPhone user is a safari user AFAIK.

AFAIK on iOS you cannot distribute an alternative browser (as in UI, network engine and rendering engine) --- you can only distribute what is essentially a skin over the default browser, Safari.

But those skinned browsers can have a different default search engine

On iOS you have to use their JS virtual machine and their HTML5 renderer. I think you can write your on UI and possibly network engine (although that might be locked down as well, but you can definitely proxy all the results.

Google is not the default search engine in China.

You have to include the cost of preventing competitors to get bigger. If Google loose its monopoly on search Google as a whole might collapse

On a similar note, assuming this is done with a default=‘true’, would this not be a contender for the most expensive code per letter ever?

I think part of it is user acquisition and another is preventing another competitor to gain traction.

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