You are probably right if we disregard the 20 years of cap-ex investments Google made into having that infrastructure. In order to in-house this we would probably need to own $500M-$1B worth of infrastructure at the very least (web is vast). Yes then the cost per search would be lower.
Maybe it will sound strange, but I do not think of our goal as optimizing for growth and number of users. It is to optimize for sustainability and quality of product. Often these two incentives are opposite of one another. I see us as a small, boutique, premium search brand. I'd rather have us gain more users by improving the quality than by lowering the price.
This strategy of not focusing on growth is key to my interests. For example, I’ve been a customer of Fastmail since they launched maybe 20 years ago. And I’ve got my family and many colleagues using Fastmail. It is a paid email service.
Could I use any of the “free” email services like GMail (or back in the day, Yahoo)? Of course. But Fastmail does one thing and they do it well, and I don’t have to worry about them analyzing my emails and selling ads to me. I am willing to pay for that.
Please stay focused. I just tried Kagi today and I’m incredibly surprised at how fantastic the search results are. I never thought I would pay for a search engine but here I am.
Maybe it will sound strange, but I do not think of our goal as optimizing for growth and number of users. It is to optimize for sustainability and quality of product. Often these two incentives are opposite of one another. I see us as a small, boutique, premium search brand. I'd rather have us gain more users by improving the quality than by lowering the price.