

Ask HN: Would You Ever Pay For Search? - RyanHolliday

My frustration recently has been the massive numbers of scraper sites polluting my SERPs. So, an idea I've had (that no doubt has been thought of before) is a search engine with editor curation &#38; user voting and reviews to determine site rankings.<p>But in keeping with Jason Cohen's post, http://blog.asmartbear.com/customer-validation.html , "When ten people say they'll give you money if you build this thing, that's the only validation that counts."<p>So: would you ever pay $1-$2 a month for search, or is Google et al cutting it just fine for you?<p>(my first HN post, hoping I'm not breaking any rules I'm not aware of here)
======
hugh3
I'd happily pay one or two dollars a month for search that was significantly
better than google. But making a better search engine than google is... highly
nontrivial.

Even if you get a few million users paying a dollar a month _before_ you stop
sucking, your total revenue is barely equivalent to google's orange juice
budget. They have thousands of engineers working on making search better
_plus_ a pretty good working search engine _plus_ huge infrastructure. What do
you have?

edit: Oh yes, and if you do manage to make search better in a way that google
hasn't thought of, your best bet is to sell it to google.

~~~
davidhollander
> _for search that was significantly better than google_

Why aren't you using Duck Duck Go? [ <http://duckduckgo.com/> ]

It's 10 times faster than Google to find stuff if you're a programmer, you can
just press J, K like it was VIM and just focus your eyes on the green box to
scan like 100 webpages instantly.

It's even faster if you don't use Chromium but a browser with a sane and
configurable BACK button (ex. Opera ex. BACKSPACE) instead of moveyour-hand +
ALT + ARROW nonsense.

Set homepage to DuckDuckGo and just press backspace with pinky to get back to
entering a new search. IMO even if you want to end up at a google service like
Google News it's faster, ex. "!news wikileaks"

~~~
eof
Really? I don't feel this way at all.

As a long time user of google and someone who has given DDG a significant
'chance' I am still using google as my default search.

Part of the reason is information density; I make a search on google and just
instantly get more on the screen, and probably because I am so used to google
i absorb that information much more quickly. I look at DDG and my brain hurts
just a tiny bit trying to parse it all.. not sure how to explain it exactly.
But as someone who really is into the idea of a search engine made for power
users / programmers.. ddg just wasn't doing it for me.

Re keyboard shortcuts: this is not a selling point for me, nor should it be
for any power user. It is trivial to map backspace to the back button in any
leading browser. I personally use 'b' for back, 'j' for down, 'k' for up.

~~~
davidhollander
Well it's a completely different cognitive heuristic. Duck Duck Go the
heuristic is continuous rapid scanning. For Google: send, receive, digest.

I believe the brain tends to only evaluate around 7+/-2 (
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two)
) chunks at a time for each comparison anyway so I prefer the minimalism of
Duck Duck Go. Which displays 7-9 results in my visual field at the default
zoom level. But I agree my original claims were perhaps a bit hyperbolic and
there is definitely a role for consumer preference in the search engine
market.

I think perhaps we can agree Google is perhaps a bit too rigid in only
offering it's single namesake search prompt and should provide further
variations of its core product to cater to a variety of heuristics for visual
processing of information.

------
SimonPStevens
No I wouldn't.

1) Because there are so many free providers out there.

2) If the free providers don't find something, I don't know what I'm missing
out on, so there is no incentive to pay. If I know that I'm missing out on
something I probably have enough information to know how to find it without
paying anyway.

What you are doing is asking people to pay for you to help them find something
when as far as they can tell they have already found it. You can't demonstrate
what value you provide to the buyer without giving all that value away.

All that said, I don't think that makes it a bad idea, just not one that you
can charge _the user_ for. If you build a system where user feedback effects
search rankings, and you can convince enough people to use it and _actually
give you feedback on sites_ , and if you got enough users I think there would
be other ways of generating revenue (probably selling to Google as someone
else suggested would be your best bet, assuming of course they didn't just
build it themselves)

[Edit: Google have tried something similar to this before -
[http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/11/google-
searchwiki-l...](http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/11/google-searchwiki-
launched.html) but it seems to have disappeared now so I'm guessing it was an
experiment that didn't work]

------
patio11
I think your pricing is off by a couple orders of magnitude if you can nail
search in a particular domain. (Court cases, for example.)

~~~
Blankwood
Right. You could use other non google alternatives and create your own
specialty search, charging for better, faster results like realtime updates
for court cases. Indextank is one such engine, and beats google on being
realtime and fully configurable (take into account things like user votes
etc). You could set up indextank to índex court filings.

------
petervandijck
Only very niche search sites (legal, medical, marketing, ...) can possibly
hope to charge people enough to be profitable. It needs to fill a need that
Google does not fulfill at all, not just be a little better.

------
tallanvor
No. Not unless you manage to come up with a very different type of search
engine. What you're talking about goes back somewhat to the earlier Yahoo days
- more a portal. More recently, Netscape tried a similar thing, but it also
didn't work so well. About.com is still doing things something like this as
well.

I've been working with search technology for a while now, and while crappy
search is easy, good search is hard. There will always be more people trying
to game the system than you have people trying to stop them, so the battle to
provide good results will never end.

------
Travis
I think 99% of the time that I search, I find what I'm looking for within 1 or
2 queries. I'm really pleased with google at this point in time. The SPAM/SERP
pages just get visually filtered by my brain.

In short, I cannot envision ever paying for general search. Unless it was in a
very specialized vertical industry, like court cases, and my current search
needs weren't being met (which they currently are, in all fields I use search
for).

------
iworkforthem
The amount of data that's created daily is so huge for even Google to index. I
am really skeptical how any search engine is able to solve the relevancy of
the search results to the keywords and the integrity of the search results
given that there will always be blackhat SEO methods.

Given that you are able to solve the above, how to store the terabyte of index
generated daily?

Assuming you solve that, next come the user experience, how to make it easy
for users to adopt your search. How can they filter the search results? How to
data visualize so that users can better understand it, etc.

Now, does $1-$2 make sense?

~~~
RyanHolliday
I don't know that the $1-$2 price point is really the important thing. I have
no idea if a search engine would make a profit at that price point.

There's no product as of now. I have no idea about storing the terabytes of
data, or data visualization, or filtering. I'm not qualified to solve most of
those problems. I'm just curious if anyone feels that this kind of search
would be worth paying for.

------
theBobMcCormick
You might be able to charge for search in a specialized sub-domain of search,
particularly if you can find a niche where the quality of search results could
make/cost the user money.

For generalized search though, I think it's gonna be hard to find many users
who will pay. Looking at Google Zeitgeist as an indicator of what most people
search for, it look to me like most searches are for fairly trivial
information. Most searches don't require the _best_ results, just a number of
_good_ results. Google and Bing both do a good job providing good results.. so
what's your selling point going to be?

------
mmap
I would be a paying search engine subscriber, even at higher price points if
the quality of the results was satisfactory and the following points were met:

(a) everything is over SSL, (b) there are no advertisements, (c) there is a
strict pro-user privacy policy without keeping logs and user profiling.

I think the saying "If you are not paying for the product, you are the
product" has a strong element of truth in it in most cases.

~~~
seunosewa
Google could easily provide that. See <http://encrypted.google.com/>

------
studindian
I don't mind paying for it if I get sensible results with ranking based on
verified users reviews and opinions included. For example, if I searching for
taxi service, I'd like to know more about the service based on feedback from
verified users before I select it.

------
eitally
You just reinvented DMOZ?

<http://www.dmoz.org/>

~~~
RyanHolliday
DMOZ doesn't really have user voting, though. But it's definitely a reasonable
comparison.

------
revorad
My guess is that some people might pay for some kinds of searches. But your
engine would have to be really fast and/or summarise results in a way Google
doesn't.

Can you give examples of the scraper sites you are talking about? What terms
are you searching for?

~~~
Alan01252
This site. <http://efreedom.com> is winding me up at the moment. It's scraping
from stackoverflow and Google has it ahead in the serps for a fair number of
search queries I've run.

I wouldn't mind so much, but a) the site isn't as user friendly as
stackoverflow and b) obviously isn't updated with answers as fast as
stackoverflow is.

Obviously I should just be searching stackoverflow directly, but I'm afraid
that habit of going to google first is a difficult one to break.

~~~
darthbinks
Looking at the traffic in Alexa, it looks like stackoverflow is doing just
fine. The UI is very similar on the two sites, except efreedom is much more
slimmed down it seems. Hopefully this site is getting people answers better
than if it didn't exist. I checked and stackoverflow does a a cc-wiki data
dump in xml so I doubt this site is html scraping, it's probably using the xml
data.

------
arn
But why would you bother charging for it, when you are likely to be able to
monetize it well if you got any traction.

~~~
RyanHolliday
Ad supported is a workable model, I agree.

The question if you would pay for it is directly because of Jason Cohen's
post. If it's not worth paying for at some level, it's probably not a problem
that's really screaming for a solution.

I'd pay for Google, for example. The fact that I don't have to pay for it is
nice, but I'd cough up every month for it if it was a premium service, because
it does something I absolutely need.

------
eof
I would pay 10x that for a site in every way like google except punctuation
didn't get ignored.

I would easily pay a couple hundred bucks a year for something significantly
better than google in anyway.

------
rick_2047
On a slightly unrelated note, how much will you pay for a service which takes
your search query and then gives customized analysis of top five sites ranked
by relevance and the quality of content.

