HI All, inspired by debate here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9960730<p>There are multiple ways to monetize website's traffic:
1) advertise,
2) make users subscribe,
3) hybrid (ads for non-paying users),
4) sell or upsell goods to the users.<p>Two questions:<p>1) Will you pay to Google $2.50/mo to remove ads (both tagged and hidden)
2) Will you pay to search engine which delivers more relevant results then Google and has no ads (same $2.50/mo)?<p>Please explain why. Thanks!
There are services for people to do online research for you (e.g. <a href="https://wonderlib.com/" rel="nofollow">https://wonderlib.com/</a>), so I think it's fair to pay for a search engine that directly gives you highly relevant (and as you suggest, human-curated) results.
Hi<p>You missed a 5th method, another (very annoying) hybrid: Advertise to everyone, <i>maybe</i> less to subscribers. The New Yorker is known for this model, among others.<p>To answer your poll (clarifying questions inline):<p>1. I would be willing to pay Google $30/year to opt-out of AdSense.<p>-Would I have to be logged in for the opt-out to work?<p>2. I would be willing to pay a Google competitor the same $30/year to have advertising-free results of equivalent quality.<p>-Where do you find another search engine whose results are <i>more</i> relevant? Do you mean having "non-personalized" results by default?
I'd pay 10€/month for a google alternative. It should rank resources based on relevancy, not mixed up with any advertising or business-political reasons. And no filter bubble please (opt-out?).
I dunno. I hate the idea of personalized ads for privacy reasons... but at the same time, if ads are inevitable, why not ones I'm interested in?<p>As for search results, a mix of logged-in-searches for usual topics and incognito for more unbiased results works well enough for me.
URL from the debate thread: <a href="http://veekaybee.github.io/who-is-doing-this-to-my-internet/" rel="nofollow">http://veekaybee.github.io/who-is-doing-this-to-my-internet/</a>
It would be hard to get this to consumers, but plenty of other search engines have a non-advertising business model. ProQuest and EBSCO get their money from libraries and institutions, for example.