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My guess is, given the scale, and amount of money on the line, the attacks against Google are far more sophisticated than just bots blindly clicking on ads.

I would hope so! But even a place like Ask.com is clearly a couple million dollars a day in ad revenue.

I wrote an ad system that was in part used to backfill Ask in a few countries and even with just backfill I was amazed at how much traffic they were still doing. Though I'm pretty sure most of it was toolbar traffic.

Yes, there is so much money in it that it's very likely there are bots with an AI trained on real human behavior samples, making it hard to distinguish from real clicks.

Actually easier than this, a bit of spyware that looks at your searching/clicking habits over a very long period and then sends that to a big mixer which then replays the same search/click with the same timing and mouse motion. I remember seeing a World of Warcraft automation script being demonstrated and thinking that it was probably used to abuse ad networks.

Sad of the demise of Blekko search engine. It's now part of IBM to build their inhouse "freebase" style data source for Watson AI, as Google closed freebase.com

I wonder what DuckDuckGo will do, as their primary search source the Yahoo BOSS API got more expensive in June 1, 2015: https://developer.yahoo.com/boss/search/#pricing ($1.80 per 1000 Queries; the free tier is no more)

$1.80/CPM should be absorbable with ad revenue, but I fear the average DuckDuckGoer runs ad blockers, blocks javascript, runs Ghostery and doesn't click on ads very often...

Looks like the old pricing was $0.80/CPM. Any idea if they have a direct contract with DDG?

> When IP's in europe, brazil, mexico and the Ukraine all search for the exact same english string and always click on the third ad down, well you can just put all of that addresses in the equivalent of an Ad "virtual kingdom" (they think they click but they don't go anywhere useful).

How much of a server drain is the "virtual kingdom"? Could you point those trap ads to some host or IP address that takes a long time for the client to reach, offloading the wasted time from your server to their client?

There was a time when Google was a likeable company creating good search engines. Now it is all about battles over the ads. In what sense is that still beneficial to an ordinary web surfer? Is this an inevitable progression or is it a matter of wrong priorities?

If you want good search engines without having to pay to use them, then those search engines need to run ads...

Is there a good ad-free search engine that I can pay for?

The issue with search engines is that they tend to get very good by using clickthrough data, so the more you use something the better it gets. Indexing and ranking algorithms can only do so much.

The interesting question is that does Google own the click through data or does the user? Does Google exclusively own the fact that you clicked on the 4th link in Google leading to php.net when you searched for 'php'?

Or can the user or government get this data to alternate search engines for better competition just like they forced Microsoft to open up Office file formats and SMB protocol docs to their rivals?

If you remember the big deal about the optional Bing bar in IE uploading the search term and clicked URL in Google search results to Bing it looks like many people on here think Google exclusively owns the clickstream data, and it's not the users' to do what it wants.

This is the reason that a paid search engine won't do very well, just like a paid social network wouldn't, because both rely on a lot of people using it to seed it and a paywall will hurt.

It is the interesting question of our times isn't it? I did the calculation for Blekko at one time and a couple of million paid subscribers could have floated the base search engine. It is hard to find people to subscribe to things on the internet though unless they are MMO games :-)

Even these days, getting people to pay for video games is hard.

Gamify the search engine experience? Give people points for each distinct search query? Have a leaderboard? Have people compete on who can find the answers to questions the fastest using a search engine? Have quests of knowledge where people have to journey through the internet solving problems for other people using search engines to gain points? Sell people power ups during the competitions/quests that allow for them to more efficiently parse through many sources of information?

Idk, the search engine experience has remained the same for what I can see for a couple decades now. I'm not surprised people wouldn't want to pay for that. But if search engines could be combined with aspects of be a mmorpgs, I'd might pay for it, or at least sell my account after I racked up enough points for someone who wants it :P

congratulations cinquemb for being the first to search for "Thailand sex tourism" enjoy your new achievement in your profile! click here to share on Facebook and Twitter!

Even for MMO games, the freemium pay-to-win games are a lot more popular than the straight subscription games.

The core problem is that while you might be willing to pay a small amount for search results, advertisers will pay a huge amount for your personal info ( or equivalently, highly targeted ads).

Remember: you are the product.

You misunderstand the ad market.

Search ads are worth 25X as much as display ads.

Search ads do not get a significant boost from personal info. Display ads do get a significant boost.

Targeting companies would show up to try to buy info from Blekko all the time. We weren't interested on principle, and, they were only offering less than 1% of what we were making off of search ads.

What you say is probally true. I just sometimes feel we've been cajoled into believing a good search engine needs to be funded with huge amounts of revenue from ads, and tracking?

That said, I wouldn't mind if Google, or Bing charged my IP provider(Comcast) for the right to use their services? Yes, Comcast would turn around and tack the extra charge to my account, but they might not?

A lot of us on here are partial to Google, but the non-tech people in my life really don't care as much as they used to. I haven't heard "Google it" for awhile now? I have heard a lot of people say, "I use Bing because of the pretty pictures?", and I'm around a lot of people who still don't quite know which search engine they are on--Yahoo seems to be sneaking into browsers--like some kind of malware?

I imagine by now, Google has most of the good patents that make running a good search engine possible, but maybe they don't? And when will these patents expire?

A good search engine is so important, I wouldn't mind if government didn't get into the search engine game? (Please don't tell me government is too inept, or ruins everything they touch. I don't know if they could do a good job? I wouldn't mind converting the NSA into one large search engine--of course without the spying?)

In summary, I don't know the true cost Google incures running their search engine? I don't think we will ever get that number at this point? I do wish DuckDuckGo well though. While writing this comment I keep thinking about what the person above me said--something about Yahoo BOSS API taking away free search tier, and charging $1.80 for a 1000 queries? Whatever the case, I hope DuckDuckGo finds a way around this, and keeps improving.

I still hear lots of people of all sort say "google it", young and old alike. I do see a bit more variety than recently, though, in terms of people using Yahoo and Bing.

As a side note, out of curiosity, are you a native English speaker? Your use of question marks seems a bit bizarre.

I tell people to "bing" things, and I get a lot of weird looks, and very rarely hostility.

Isn't this a tad presumptuous? Google is a large company - there are likely as many engineers working on ads spam as search quality.

For every search if the thing you want is the first result, I'd imagine there would be quite a big drop in revenue.