You don't like to hear it, I support search engine fees

Bad reviews

2024-06-27 11:50Digital creators

If you had to pay a dollar for every 10 searches, would you still use a search engine?

Some poor friends may hear this and think that it is not a question of "whether to use it or not", but a question of "whether Lao Tzu sprays or not".

After all, since we came into contact with the Internet, search engines such as Google, Bing, Baidu, and Sogou have always been free. Exploring the world of the Internet at will has long been engraved in our DNA and has become an inherent habit.

As a result, now tell me to ask for money? Just report its name, and you can see if I do it or not, it's over.

Don't worry, those old search engines really don't dare to charge casually.

The one who dares to charge is the following search engine called Kagi, which was just launched two years ago.

Each Kagi user only has 100 free search opportunities, and when they run out, they have to sign up for membership.

There are three tiers of membership.

The cheapest is $5/month, but only 300 searches; The middle tier is $10 / month, and there is no upper limit on the number of searches; The most expensive $25 / month allows you to enjoy the new features in advance.

I don't know what my friends think of this pricing, anyway, our editorial department thinks it's expensive, and the $5 file is not enough.

However, Kagi also brought in a set of survey data, saying that the average Google user searches 100 times a month.

Okay, let's just let that $5 be enough, and spend $400 on search engines that year, and the poor friends are not happy.

But guess what?

As recently as May, Kagi was already profitable. And they also said that if this growth momentum is maintained, the number of paying users will reach 1 million within 3 years.

Looking at you, you might wonder, no? Who is using Kagi, is it because Google doesn't have enough, or is the money available to scan the code and rent it?

The bad reviewer didn't understand it either, so he specially experienced Kagi.

After experiencing it, I don't think Kagi has much to offer, and there is only one point that can be seen by everyone - no ads.

It's not that the bad reviewer said that there are really too many ads in search engines now. Sometimes an entire page slides down, and there is not a single answer that has not been tainted by money.

Oh I'm not targeting anyone, I'm saying: the major search engines in this room, all of you.

For example, if I want to search for "how to reset Windows", what I expect to see is to teach me how to reset Windows in the settings.

However, the first three clicks in the search results provided by Bing are all advertisements for installed software.

Similarly, the bad reviewer's hair has fallen out a little fast recently, so I searched for "baldness" to understand the concept of baldness.

It's good, and I was quickly rushed to the hair transplant hospital.

If you want to know which headphones are the best to use, you definitely have to look at some third-party reviews.

But after you type "best headphones" into Google, the advertiser's headphones will appear, and the price and link are marked for you, and you can buy it by clicking on it.

I'm sure everyone has encountered a similar situation and wants to discuss it. The bad reviewer also swiped a news some time ago, saying that the president of DingTalk complained about it directly at the conference.

Let's take a look at the search results for Kagi.

Search for "how to reset Windows", and the first three results it gives are from ASUS, Zhihu user answers, and Windows official.

After clicking on the link, they all provided the answer I wanted: how to reset Windows in the settings.

Similarly, if you search for "best headphones", the first line is the posts discussed by the major communities, and the last two lines are articles that the media reviews a variety of headphones and makes different recommendations for different groups of people.

It can be said that with Kagi it is easy for us to find the results we want, and we will not be delayed by advertisements and affect our judgment.

In addition to Muko, Kagi also has some novel features.

For example, it supports highly customized search results.

If you think a website is reliable, you can increase its authority so that it will be higher in the search results. If you hate a website, you can also reduce its weight or even block it altogether.

There are also personalized leaderboards in the Kagi community for you to refer to which sites are recognized by everyone.

In addition, Kagi is also connected with AI capabilities.

You can summarize a single page individually, or extract important content from the entire search results page.

Finally, Kagi has a unique design.

The PageRank algorithm of traditional search engines will rank large websites with a high number of citations at the top. Those niche but high-quality websites are difficult for everyone to dig into.

Similar to Google, Kagi lets you choose the scope of your search, such as academics, forums, and news, but it cleverly adds the Small Web category to let you discover niche sites.

At the moment, Kagi is gaining momentum. Its community is very active, and spam sites that use SEO to get to the top of the results will soon be officially banned.

Bad reviewers can also get Kagi's praise from time to time on the Internet.

Someone wrote a blog post explaining why they started using Kagi; Some people say that after using Kagi, it is rare to find spam websites; Someone else tried it for a month and directly initiated the carpooling of the annual family group.

After reading the introduction of the bad reviewer, I don't know if everyone has found it, Kagi has a difference from the old search engine:

Whose page comes first is not because of who gives more money, but because the user decides for himself.

This kind of user-centric, unadvertised search engine actually relies on a bold decision-

Ask the user how much they charge, not the advertiser.

Of course, I know that many netizens can't accept paid search engines, and some people think that the content is created by others, so why do manufacturers use search engines to make money?

But to say that the existence of paid search engines is a reasonable thing, even a good thing.

Don't be in a hurry to spray me, let's talk about it in three points.

The first point.

There is nothing wrong with this kind of integration of information and making a "poor information gap", because there is a cost to the establishment and maintenance of search engines.

You have to be a crawler and get web content on the web; Be an indexer, parse and categorize content; to databases, storage indexes and archives; To do front-end services and respond to requests; The result sorting algorithm should be continuously optimized to improve the user experience.

With hundreds of millions of web pages, each of these buildings costs a lot of money to build, and if it doesn't charge, it can't be operated.

It's like you're in a strange place and someone draws a map. You have a need, you buy a map, you pay for it, there's nothing wrong with it.

Some poor friends may see this and say, why don't Google and Baidu charge money.

This is the second point: in fact, Baidu and Google are also "charged".

In 2023, Google's advertising revenue in the U.S. reached $76 billion, which is $23 per user per month, based on the 274 million U.S. users at the time.

In other words, while you're using a search engine, the search engine is also using you to make money.

It's just that instead of your money, they take your time and preference data. We are not so sensitive to money compared to these two, so we always think that "search engines are free".

Okay, so let's move on to the third point.

Now that the business model of the entire search engine industry is stuck in a dead loop, it is a good thing to have a paid search engine.

Back in the 90s, the number of web pages exploded exponentially as the Internet skyrocketed.

To make it easier for everyone to find the information they need, two Stanford University students, Sergei J. Brin and Lawrence · Page developed the PageRank algorithm, and a company called Google was born.

At the time, both were opposed to the use of ad pop-ups in search engines, as well as the "ad-funded search engine" model.

In 1998, they also published a white paper entitled "Anatomy of a Large Hypertext Web Search Engine", in which Kuku made a statement that they wanted to maintain an ad-free search engine:

Commercial search engines, which are funded by advertising, are inherently biased towards advertisers and away from consumer demand. From a consumer's perspective, the better the search engine, the fewer ads consumers will see to find the answers they want. But this will erode the search engine's advertising business model.

Whether it was then or now, the speeches of these two college students are full of charm and can attract countless fans.

But reality is not utopia.

Not long after the company was founded, the two handsome guys' minds changed, and simple text ads began to appear in Google.

At the beginning, the ad will also have a distinct background color to make it easier for users to distinguish between them. Google employees will also taunt Baidu, saying that Baidu makes ads no different from native search results.

But gradually, the background color of the advertisement became lighter and lighter. In 2013, Google simply removed the background color and replaced it with an "Ad" ad tag.

Half a year later, attentive people noticed that the "Ad" tag had also become smaller, and the width had changed from the original 40 pixels to 22 pixels.

And then one day, people suddenly found that the ads in Google couldn't be distinguished without looking closely.

The search engine that rejected ads at the beginning completely became an advertisement in the process of "the level of user recognition has improved, the advertiser is not satisfied, the ad has become more like a search result, and the level of user recognition has improved again".

Bad reviewers think, this will be recycled for decades, and we won't have to wear a microscope to surf the Internet?

Actually, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing for search engines to have ads.

On the contrary, I also support them to adopt this business model, because only by having no threshold can everyone swim in the ocean of the Internet.

But once you've chosen an ad model, you have to find a balance between users and advertisers. While the benefits are guaranteed, the experience must be guaranteed.

But it's hard to maintain that balance.

The engine needs to be maintained, and the company needs to start a new business. In order to earn more profits, the user's experience is gradually ignored and becomes a victim.

Of course, Baidu and Google must have considered paid search engines.

But paying means that most netizens will be blocked, and search engines are a winner-takes-all industry, and users will not change it after selecting one, which leads to a continuous cycle of advertising business models in the industry, and no one wants to try new models.

So now, there is a paid search engine that can even be profitable, and the bad reviewer thinks it's a good thing, and the dilemma of the search engine industry may be broken.

If there is a paid search engine in China and the pricing is reasonable, then the bad reviewer is definitely the first to support it.

Because the business model of a free search engine is a game.

They cast their nets in the sea, and we use our experience to evade advertising by moving around and moving.

But to be honest, after so many years, I have indeed had enough of the deceit and intrigue that have been repeated every day.

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