this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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I might be the odd person out here, but if Google offered a premium sub service that did 0 data collection and I never got served a thing by ad sense, I'd pay for it.
My thought is that with data collection and advertising you become the product that is being sold. I'd rather buy a product than be a product.
EDIT: Not just search, but a sub for all Google products I use.
Free/Tracking you = $$
Subscription/not tracking you = $$
Both = $$$$
See: youtube premium
Lmao they would just lie about collecting information.
im a american and this is simply the american way
Knowing Google, they'd charge you and still track you. Also, if YouTube Red is any indication, they'd probably charge closer to $150. You can get a search engine that doesn't track you or have ads called Kagi, for $10 per month.
Not quite there for non-tech folks, but the paid search engine Kagi immensely improved my search experience.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/why-pay-for-search.html
Absolutely love Kagi. The smol web, API, rss feeds, rank/block sites, it's an invaluable resource.
I may use Google images once or twice a month, but I never Google anymore.
I’m a subscriber here. Search works great. Better than google for my use cases. Maps are still rough. AI integrations are good, better than free providers like bing.
I recommend Kagi for anyone with enough technical expertise to figure out how to set their search providers. It’s hard to do this on mobile unfortunately.
It's very easy on Android
It’s terrible on iOS. There’s no real way to do it other than…installing a new browser.
I just switched all my browsers to use kagi about 2 weeks ago. On my Android phone, all I had to do was open chrome's settings, click search engine, and I could change it right there. :)
s/mobile/ios/ above then I suppose :/
Oh, they’d be happy to offer you that for $4.99/mo. Then, after a year or so, they’d inject some preferred provider search results, and bump the ad-free tier to $9.99 mo. The $4.99 tier would be unlimited search, but with ads. Want to block bullshitty SEO sites? Extra $2.99.
kagi.com basically offers this.
their actual search results are generally better than google as well. probably because they don't have a financial incentive to push you towards ads.
I would 100% pay $15/month to use Google products without being tracked and sold.
I do not trust Google to honor their word. They absolutely would charge and find a way to sell your data. They would probably word it in such a way that would make it seem like all is good.
Yeah, I agree with you there. I wouldn't pay Google for privacy unless they could provide some pretty convincing evidence that they are not tracking and selling my information. That might not even be possible, though. It's tough to prove a negative.
I suppose that what I mean is that I'd be willing to pay Google $15/month to not track me in any way if they could figure out a way to convince me that they truly are not tracking me. I would need some real assurances, though, not just "we're not tracking you, we promise!" I have no idea how they can provide that kind of assurance, though.
I'm not a google shill. I'm just someone who is trying to have a conversation about this. It seems that, right now, the only way to be mostly sure that you're not being tracked is to use self-hosted services and, even then, you'd need to examine the source code or trust the FOSS community to keep tabs on things.
but why do that when there's options like using ecosia and uBlock Origin.
I use ad blockers but it isn't lost on me that services I use cost money to operate. That money is provided by selling data and ad clicks.
Because of ad blockers trying to cut off the revenue source we end up with a battle between companies and users where the most popular browser on the planet is adding things like this - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrity-api-sounds-like-drm-for-the-web/
I'd much rather provide the revenue for the services I find valuable and not have a ton of middleware enforcing web drm to ensure I'm advertised to.
Are you making the argument that ad blocking software is the reason for companies aggressively mining user data?
I'm arguing that add blockers are causing companies like Google to fight ad blockers. They aggressively mine data because it's profitable to target ads with it.
If millions of people didn't use ad blockers there wouldn't be much of a reason for them to spend engineering dollars on Web Identity DRM tools to attempt to prevent changes to web pages by blockers.
The ROI on selling bulk data and forwarding ads vastly outweighs whatever change you're dropping into the meter. Even if you do pay for a premium service, your data is still going to get collected and you're still going to look at ads, because why would Google just pass up on that money?
You'll have the data collection and ads obfuscated, through some combination of variant interfaces and marketing language and dense, unreadable EULAs. But its going to happen no matter how much you pay, because its cheaper to lie to you than to forgo this data collection.
But that's just it. We're not going towards an either/or model. We're going to a both model.
You seem to be under the impression that I think it is moving in the direction I'd like it to. I do not think that. I said that if it were offered to have a paid service I would prefer it.
Looking at calculated stats from 2016 which admittedly are out of date showed an ARPU of $6.70 a quarter. Assuming that has gone up by 10x and it's $70 per quarter I think a paid service is well within the realm of possibility.
As someone who no doubt is in the minority of users, I don't think having a paid option for those that would use it would have a big impact on the bottom line. Most people would pile onto the free service and let Google suck up all the data they want. For people like myself that don't click on ads intentionally, they'd probably make more money off of me individually by taking my money directly.
That's fine. But consider how the Netflix and Amazon model are following Hulu towards "ad supported" media, despite already being a paid-for service.
I don't think there's a threshold at which data providers will sincerely exempt the individual from surveillance and ads. Even if its something you're offered, all you're purchasing is deception. You'll still get your data siphoned surreptitiously. And you'll still get promos and teasers and native ads that the streaming service gets paid to show you.
I would definitely use the account my work pays for. Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that's why I search on company time.
You know your employer can do a takeout on your gsuite search history, right?
My employer called me the other day to ask me about a purchase I made online using my company laptop the day before. They're always watching.
Yeah, and suddenly they'd focus on giving you relevant search results, not relevant ads.
But hey, try explaining this to the broke students who populate this place.
I'd pay, but only if the actual search results were not just a bunch of adds. I want the search engine to be as useful as it was 10 or so years ago.
The irony being that the internet advertising ecosystem is collapsing. Advertisers are understanding that the ROI for the marketing dollar is being thwarted by poor data collecting algorithms and adblockers.
Haha funny guy.
YaCy
That's the most unhinged thing I've read in - well 5 minutes but it's still crazy
What is unhinged about it?
Being open to subscription fees to remove data collection and ads after Google's search engine became the trashiest, least useful search engine out there. https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/
I personally find a lot of Google's services valuable to use and like them. You may hate Google search, but you can see at the bottom of my original post that I would sub for all Google services, not search specifically.
All services that operate have to be funded in some way. Right now for Google services that it's done through collecting user data and selling it to advertisers.
I would prefer to pay a fee to fund those services I use if it meant my data was not collected and I was not served ads.
I personally find it more unhinged to think that everything online is somehow magically cost free to provide. Engineers have to code and deploy it, servers have to be purchased, electricity has to be generated, etc. If you have a service online that is "free", you need to ask where the money comes from to do all of those things. Chances are, it's from your data being sold and privacy reduced.
Maps is the only service they have that isn't bested by something else.
They're not making pennies on that data.
To pay vs letting them slurp up your data you'd be paying Alphabet thousands a year. It will never happen, but sure. It's a nice fantasy.
Your math doesn't make sense. In 2022 Google had $253B in annual ad revenue. Most estimates that I find have Google services users at 1 Billion+ on the low end. The Ad Revenue per User would be less than $25 a month.
That is an amount that I would pay for all the services I use. I already pay for YouTube premium which is more than half that cost.
It's not for everyone. There are many categories of people; those who couldn't afford a monthly fee, those that would rather get a free service for data collection and ads even if they could afford it, and those of us that would happily pay for services if the data collection and ads went away.
There is an argument that the services would be less valuable if data weren't collected to build the quality of results, like maps data and what not. I would argue that enough people would prefer to go the ad supported route to make that argument moot though.
More than half of their claimed user accounts are inactive. So many in fact that they're starting to auto-delete inactive accounts. The only way they'd agree to such an idea is if it were far, far more expensive.