
Ask HN: What would you pay monthly to be searchable? - thomas536
For $10-20 per month (the rough cost of middle of the road web hosting), what would you pay to be searchable? Your favorite niche vertical like your twitter network, full fidelity search of the glory days of Usenet posts, your bookshelf?
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jolmg
The written content of images and the spoken content of videos on the
internet?

Not sure about the monthly-bill thing. It'd have to be content that I'd want
to search multiple times a week, and I don't think there's any like that.

Maybe a better pricing model would be a set number of searches? $5 for 100
searches or something like that? That might align better with the costs, too.

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thomas536
(Yeah the exact billing model is fungible/an example to get people to think in
terms of actually willing to fork over money.)

Do you mean you might have a specific and relatively small set of videos that
you would like searched, but at a much lower price point (e.g. 10k videos at
less than $10/year)?

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jamesponddotco
I would pay up to $120 per month for a search engine that had its own crawler,
and was completely open source, as long as it worked with JS disabled.

The crawler is, arguably, the hardest part. We have open source search engines
out there, like searx[1], but most of them are search aggregators, and depend
on Google, Bing, and a few other established search engines.

[1] [https://github.com/asciimoo/searx](https://github.com/asciimoo/searx)

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jolmg
> $120 per month

Though I'm curious if there's an actual market for a monthly-subscription
Google competitor, I very much doubt this bid would be representative of it.

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jamesponddotco
I do not think there is a market for this — a big one, anyway —, and agree
that what I would pay is not representative of what others would, I was just
answering the question ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

~~~
thomas536
+1 I appreciate your answer!

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hyko
I don’t understand what you mean?

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thomas536
Most searching (e.g. web, email, torrents) is based on ads, which works
because of the utility to a huge number of people. There are many things one
might in passing want to be able to search (e.g. quickly finding the location
of particular book on your disorganized bookshelf, non-web text content, etc.)
but don't have mass appeal to sustain ads revenue. And even many of those
wants aren't worth paying a few dollars for let alone the cost of hosting
search.

So does anyone in the HN crowd have a search-based itch they're willing to pay
to have scratched that's not already handled by existing search products?

