
A startup is testing a subscription model for search engines - cpeterso
https://www.wired.com/story/a-startup-is-testing-the-subscription-model-for-search-engines/
======
chadash
Count me out. I'm willing to pay for things that improve my life, but if
anything, this is likely to be a downgrade in terms of user experience.

Google benefits from the fact that they have billions of users. The nominal
cost of their overhead per user is very very low. A company like this is gonna
struggle to get even a million users, let alone billions. So even if they
charge, it's unlikely they can keep up with Google's infrastructure.

I care about my privacy a little, but less than the cost of a subscription +
added hassle / downgraded user experience. I'm betting the the market of
people for whom the tradeoff is worthwhile is low enough thast this company
won't take off. But I support competition, so I hope i'm wrong.

~~~
matlin
It's actually using Bing under the hood so it doesn't need to get to Google-
size on its own to get similar quality from user interactions.

If I had to bet, Neeva will go after business users and combine Bing's index
of the public web with their index of internal business data to make a catered
experience that's subscription worthy.

I mean it kind of makes sense. How is there not currently a company offering
businesses a way to circumvent Google's ad machine and have customizable scope
and indexes?

~~~
chris_f
_> If I had to bet, Neeva will go after business users and combine Bing's
index of the public web with their index of internal business data to make a
catered experience that's subscription worthy._

Completely agree. There is much easier money to be made in a B2B premium
search app than in the consumer space.

It is also a common path for search companies; for example FAROO went that
direction.

~~~
three_seagrass
Yep - there are already major players in that space:
[https://www.algolia.com/](https://www.algolia.com/)

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ALittleLight
I'm very interested in the idea, but I don't like:

"Like Neeva, Startpage sources search results externally—in its case, directly
from Google"

I've been having a lot of trouble with Google search results lately. They seem
to be getting worse all the time. I'd love to join a new search engine, but if
the limit of their search quality is Google, I just can't get that excited.

I'd prefer to start using something that is 80% of the quality of Google and
getting better, than something that is fixed to Google.

~~~
sjtindell
To me this isn’t a problem with Google, but with SEO. Gaming the system to get
a better ranking is an entire industry now, and that won’t stop no matter
which engine is the most popular.

~~~
ALittleLight
One solution would be a good, but unpopular search engine. SEO wouldn't
optimize for it because the returns wouldn't be there, and I could use it and
get good results, because it would be good.

I can imagine paying a subscription to use it is one way to have a good and
unpopular search engine.

~~~
asdff
Eventually that too will be subject to eternal September. You can't win,
unless you make your own and never share it.

~~~
6510
keep the secret!

------
qchris
This seems like some pretty good reporting-- I was particularly interested by
the sections noting the difference between the marketing speech that is
featured heavily on the site and the actual language used in the privacy
policy and ToS.

Those kind of discrepancies really make it tough for me to get interested in a
company, because despite the best intentions of people, function often follows
form. If an organization doesn't take their mission seriously enough to modify
their corporate structure to fundamentally align the two (I think a public
benefit corporation with reporting requirements is an example of that), then
I'm not sure why other people should either.

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Animats
Neeva is interesting. It might be worth having a premium search engine. The
first pages of Google and Bing are now almost all ads. Often, badly chosen
ads. Some people may pay $10 a month not to see that. But it's a niche. I
don't see how this gets big. Maybe if it was sold to Comcast or AT&T and came
bundled with Internet connectivity.

Anybody know anyone over at Neeva? I'd like to talk to them.

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chris_f
It makes no sense that this article writes off DuckDuckGo as a similar
offering and compares it more to Startpage.

DDG and Neeva are both based on Bing, and both integrate (or plan to
integrate) many other search sources. Startpage only provides Google results
supplemented by Wikipedia for some queries.

The one advantage Neeva might have is that it integrates personal services as
search sources (like gmail and dropbox). Personally that has never been a pain
point for me though.

A few months back I started working on a search engine (in my sig) based on
the hypothesis that a better search engine can be built by curating vertical
specific sources to provide higher relevance for niche search topics. I truly
believe a federated data source search engine will be the future, but time
will tell.

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cvg
I like this user-centric vision of the web where users are customers. We’re
trained so deeply that ad supported is free, when really it’s just a deferment
of costs. Companies always get you by adding marketing costs into their costs.
Once Neeva cleans up their data policies, I’m al in with them.

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devmunchies
> If you want the most impact to help the most people with privacy, you have
> to be free -- DDG CEO

This is true, but only relevant if your goal is to help the _most_ people.

Looking at companies like Superhuman (premium email client for business
executives and investors), you can build a company that focusses on power
users.

If a search engine were to be optimized for Programers, Product Managers, Team
Leads, Directors, etc it could improve lot's of people's work.

------
Kiro
> However, DuckDuckGo may not be the most relevant comparison to Neeva. The
> new search engine is planned to be a second-tier provider, with public
> results sourced from Bing, Weather.com, Intrinio, and Apple.

DDG is also a second-tier provider that is sourcing its results from Bing.

> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which
> we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and
> none from Google).

Source: [https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
pages/results/so...](https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
pages/results/sources/)

------
plextoria
I would like to pay for web search, but per usage. I hate subscriptions
because they are a pain to keep track of and I end up paying for stuff I don’t
use, like Netflix.

~~~
smnrchrds
Per usage pricing will result in misaligned incentives. It will be in the
interest of the search engine provider to provide worse results, so you have
to make multiple searches and some trial and errors with keywords until you
get the result you were looking for.

In the end, the company notices that when they make improvements to their
algorithms, their revenue goes down. So they stop making improvements.

~~~
Closi
Counterpoint: If they gave me terrible results I would just go to another
service.

If it's pay-per-search there is zero friction for me to go to another
provider.

It's probably not a practical charging mechanism, but it's an interesting
thought. I also don't believe a monthly charging subscription is the right
model but this is a tough one to get right.

~~~
smnrchrds
> _Counterpoint: If they gave me terrible results I would just go to another
> service._

There would be an optimum point where the results are good enough that people
won't leave the service en masse, but bad enough that they spend way more than
necessary on it. The optimum point is where the profits will be maximized for
the search provider. Thanks to the advances is AI/ML/Data Science methods and
tools, a savvy company will find this point and stays there until the point
moves.

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swyx
> Like Neeva, Startpage sources search results externally—in its case,
> directly from Google. Unlike Neeva, Startpage still shows Google ads and
> collects a cut of the proceeds

anyone know how this works? can any startup just proxy Google like that, or do
you need to be some sort of official search partner of Google? just curious bc
I have often wondered if I myself could attempt a modified search system as a
side project.

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ozten
The positioning is confusing, but could be a potential FYI[1] competitor.
Their goal is to provide unified search across Dropbox, Google Docs, Google
Drive, etc which businesses would happily pay for.

Or perhaps a vertical search engine for B2B...

If it is truly a general B2C search engine play, I think ignoring DDG as a
datapoint is a misstep.

[1] [https://usefyi.com/](https://usefyi.com/)

------
1024core
The biggest problem with Google currently is: monetization.

Try searching for a commercial term. For example: say you want to buy an OLED
TV, and want to see what it looks like wall-mounted. So try "OLED65CXPUA
wallmount" in Google, and you're barraged with ads and ads-disguised-as-
content. Even the Google Image Search page is littered with ads (both overt
and covert).

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didip
I have this dream of an alternate search engine:

* Aggressively prune bad actors (spammy, zero-value, etc.) with ML.

* I am ok with rated-E only content (no porn, etc).

* Zero ads, I am fine with paying premium subscription price / month.

This dream search engine should have a considerably small index size, thus low
operational costs.

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Nginx487
How it would fit the market with services like DuckDuckGo, Startpage and
SearX? All these services provide internet search for free. DuckDuckGo has its
own engine, Startpage and SearX are meta-engines, reusing existing services.

~~~
Shank
I hate to be the eleventh person to say this, but it bares repeating if it
gets lost: DuckDuckGo primarily uses the Bing index and search engine for most
results. There isn't any set of branding that says this plainly, but that's
where most results are coming from. Startpage is pretty different because it
uses Google under the hood, but I definitely get different results from
Google, Startpage, and DuckDuckGo with regular frequency. Whatever the secret
sauce is on top matters a lot in terms of presentation. Any engine that puts
in effort for a target audience will be able to acquire users.

For me, DuckDuckHack has always returned really awesome results on top of what
I consider to be a fairly lackluster set of results for some searches that
bing provides. If another provider wanted to step it up with extra sauce on
top, I'd be more than happy to try if it makes my day to day better.

~~~
Nginx487
Thanks for the insight, however, would you provide some source, explaining how
DuckDuckGo-Bing "hack" is implemented.

> but I definitely get different results from Google, Startpage, and
> DuckDuckGo

Different results from Google and Startpage are expected, because Google
offers personalized search adjustment. Even if you're not logged in, Google
uses Ubercookies and fingerprinting techniques to identify you as a unique
user

~~~
Kiro
[https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
pages/results/so...](https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
pages/results/sources/)

> > We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which
> we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and
> none from Google).

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davidhyde
It would be great if the subscription money went to automatically unlocking
pay walled content so we don't have to individually sign up to all these sites
we would rather not share our details with.

------
bookmarkable
What does this solve that DuckDuckGo hasn’t?

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opqpo
It may work for enterprises that want to search the web via an API. But for
normal people? I extremely doubt it.

------
Sloppy
Count me signed up.

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alfiedotwtf
Off-topic, but what did ever happen to Cuil?

~~~
Animats
Failed to get another round of funding and shut down very suddenly. Founders
were hired by Google to keep them from trying again.

~~~
alfiedotwtf
Ah. Damn, that’s a shame

~~~
Animats
I talked to them. They wanted to undercut Google on cost. If you don't do
personalization, running a search engine isn't that expensive. I asked what
the business model was. They didn't have a revenue plan. That was a problem.

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garmaine
Why would I use this when DuckDuckGo exists?

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sushshshsh
Never in a million years. No matter the price tag. I refuse to be billed for
95 different things in life

