Slashdot Mirror
Google Considers 'Speciality' Subscriptions
jdclucidly writes "C|Net is reporting that Google is considering moving to a subscription based service for educational and commercial entities. The new service will be a specialized spider in addition to their already popular web search." Lexis-Nexis, Google's coming for you.
As long as it stays, I don't mind too much advertising. Just don't make me use another search engine.
... a search engine that lists every non-banner ad, non pop up, non advertising, free porn site in existance... both of them.
Is it really going to work? SourceForge started a subscription service recently also. Seems like more and more companies are going this route. Are people going to pay all these sites money when there usually exists a free alternative?
... until "Pr0n Image Search" is available for subscription?
I wanna buy stock the day before.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Not long now until another free search engine comes along and replaces Google in the same way that Google replaced Altavista!
..then Google will be sucessful at this endeavour. The key quesion is can they provide enough value to generate price subscription revenue. Their technology is mature but the content is questionable at best. Too bad the economy is forcing major instituitions to re-evaluate their budgets. I know that libraries and R&D departments are often the first to have their funding slashed.
I fully support google doing this, because I'd be very upset (with everyone else in the world, of course), if anything ever happened to them. On the other hand, we've been using google forever as the perfect example of ads. We always used to be able to say, "Look at google, they're fully supported by completely unobtrusive, targetted ads, that people actually click on when they're interested!" This change will take away our ability to say that, and, really, the claim seems less convincing when you add on, "...accept for all the money they make off some organizations for access to their specialized features." I'd also worry about them pulling a salon, and slowly making more and more of their formerly "standard" features subscription-based, until you can't do anything except perform one sample search of their choosing without paying huge sums of money. I can justify paying for salon, since I now read it instead of any newspaper, but I'm not sure the same would be true for a search engine.
For now, though, unless they do something that makes it hard for me to do what I can currently do for free, I welcome anything they do to increase their income...
This is a self-referential sig
I think that's a great idea, they said that they will be doing it for corporate clients. Hopefully they don't touch the regular users. Google Rocks!!!
don't forget adult check! That thing is killer!
I'm really happy with the service Google provides. Some of the stuff that pops up on those pay search engines is insulting to say the least. Google rocks and I hope they can get some loot rolling in to support them.
Cheap storage VM.
people typing in "google" into their google search.
/. nav bar, I type in slashdot every once in a while to see what turns up.
On a similar note, I like the new
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
If they beefed up Google Groups by adding archives before 1995, added a more powerful query mechanism (maybe regexp, even at the cost of reduced speed), and finally formatted the results in some more sensible fashion, I'd pay a fair bit per year for that. Given that I use deja (old habits die hard) many times every day, that would be worth even $100 a year for me.
I wonder if their ranking algorithm--which depends on using links as a guide to authoritativeness--would do worse on specialized "vertical" document collections, which might contain less meaningful (or no) links.
Or will they just modify the algorithm? E.g., for a patent search use the cross-references that are embedded in filings?
I wish this was the case. Especially for the lexis legal research side.
I doubt they can replace these types of services in the immediate future. It takes tons of labor to acquire the material needed to put together these services. Especially if you offer a value-added component such as indexing and headnotes.
The promise of having this information on the internet has disappeared. During the economic boom, there were a lot of great web sites that took the time to digitize subsets of this information. They didn't index the material or offer the value-added features, but the raw content was still available.
Since we have dipped into a recession, these sites either cease to exist, or they are updated too infrequently to be relied upon.
To my knowledge the only companies that have these data stores are Lexis and for some legal and business matters, West Publishing. I don't see how Google can get the information without a licensing agreement from either company. If they have to pay for the license, I don't see how I could reap any benefits. Google's subscription couldn't be much lower than Thompson (Lexis) or West. Both services offer reasonable search capabilities in their present incarnation.
It seems offering free anything isn't going to make you a penny... free searches, free software...
As long as I can still use it for free I don't care really what they do to it. Ads don't bother me much anymore so if they ad more it doesn't matter to me.
OH NOES! TEH INTARWEB IS BORKEN!
If I subscribe to say "linux" and "porn", I'll have nice "linux" and "porn" radio buttons next to the search terms field, which, when pressed, will transparently add the words "linux" and/or "porn" to my query terms? Sounds like a good deal, thanks Google!
This really isn't a new market. It sounds like they'd be trying to take people out of the existing 'free service' and make them pay some fees to get a slightly different service. All in all it's the same service, you search for something and you find it. I don't see much of a market for making people pay for something they can get for free. Now, if they dumbed down their free service so you couldn't find anything maybe people would be willing to pay a little premium in order to achieve their goal...
Just because I AM paranoid doesn't mean they're NOT out to get me.
And what's wrong with that?
West Publishing does aka Westlaw. Lexis licenses the content.
That said I doubt google is looking into providing legal research capabilities. They may be moving into the Nexis (news archive) side of the business though.
And this is exactly why I will only use Google for my searching needs. Why would I want a lesser relevant result just because some company with cash thinks I should see thier website first?
I posted to
Slashdot sees revenue in ads, fees
By Gwendolyn Mariano
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
October 25, 2001, 12:30 p.m. PT
Slashdot.org, the "news for nerds" Web site popular among software developers and Linux fans, said this week that it plans to use larger ads and offer a subscription service.
When Slashdot increases ad sizes, it plans to introduce a subscription service for people who want to pay for an ad-free version. Jeff Bates, who runs the site, said Thursday that Slashdot will launch the new ads and subscription service early next year. The cost of the service has yet to be determined.
"The larger ad formats are coming about really because, as Bob Dylan put it, 'The times, they are a'changing,'" Bates wrote in an e-mail interview. "While we'll still be mostly featuring the 468-by-60 banner, we're trying to work with our advertisers and see how we can work together. Rest assured though, we'll still be only having one ad per page."
I like it, but if they don't go with the common mainstream stuff. For example, if they targeted specific hobbies, it would really be valuable. My example (which I can't hope for them to address) of classic arcade games (the actual 6' ones you find in the arcade) really could use a STRONG search engine that is focused on the niche.
It'd hook me up with schematics and other things I need. Great for niche exploration.
Think about it: how many times per day do you use Google/Google Groups? As for me, it's a bunch.
I must conclude that, if Google charged, I'd be forced to pay.
-(())
Google really should have done this a while ago. At the stage of growth the have attained it's the next logical step to undertake. I for one would not want them to implement banners and such to get revenue. Let the compagnies and large institution cover the expenses, since the service they will receive will probably be excellent anyway.
Imperium et libertas
Autocracy and freedom
A pointy-haired marketing boss meets with his crew: "Ok, team. A few days ago, one of the geeks pointed me to this story on Slashdot. After reading it and the comments associated with it, I realized that Google is missing out on the critical "search engines that suck" marketplace. As a result, many people are using our site, thus increasing our hardware and bandwidth costs. In an effort to reduce these expenses, and generate revenue, we need to come up with a way to make Google suck more. Any ideas?
Clueless Git #1: I'm thinking pop-up windows, and lots of them. Nothing sucks more than that!
Clueless Git #2: No, no, no. Pop-up windows have been done to death, and there are too many ways to disable them. We need something else; How about loading down the page with graphics and banner ads?
Clueless Git #3: Sure, that's going to suck, but people can always turn off graphics. We need something that will make the site not only more annoying, but also inherently less useful.
Clueless Git #2: How about switching the whole site to the Bulgarian language? That'd make it pretty much useless, everywhere except Bulgaria.
Clueless Git #1: No, it needs to be just useless enough that people won't use it, but with just enough value that we can charge people for it.
Clueless Git #2: I have an idea. Let's segment the index into narrow interest groups, and then charge people to use certain groups!
PHB: That's a fantastic idea! It's less useful, while giving the impression of added value. Make it happen!
Google works, the best there is that i know of. Why change it if it works?
But if they do consider changing, i would they get a different domain name for their second service. I just dont like change.
I hope that Google's search engine will get a whole lot better and from my understanding of the web-spider, the database will be kept up-to-date with new links added every day, and with their cache on popular pages, this is going to dramatically improve google's effectiveness as a search engine. Only problem to deal with now is dead-links.
As a _former_ Northern Light employee (and there are quite a few of us as of recent), I can vouch for the fact that vertical search and subscription services have not proven financially fruitful. Perhaps Google's architecture will prove a more fertile ground for this type of revenue generation.
Google is not moving to a subscription based service. They are adding a subscription based service that goes above and beyond what they already have, adding expertise and tailored searches for organizations who would pay for it. This is a great idea, and an excellent source of new revenue (more stable than ad revenue, which is their primary source of income). Some people here think google will require everyone to pay to use the site. This is not true. For most of us, we won't notice the difference.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
I would gladly pay a reasonable (~$5.00/month or so ...) for use of Google's search engine without ads.
I would pay a little extra (maybe another $5.00) for a customized search service. For example, Google offers BSD users a way to search
BSD-related pages. I would like to have additional topic-relevant searches that I could define (or pick from a list). For instance, I'd like a Mac OS X search, a Chesapeake Bay Retriever search, a Jeep search, etc., etc.
If they would provide a search bar for Mozilla (like the Google bar for IE, sans spyware), I would pay a one-time fee for this.
There are lots of ways for this company to make money. I hope that they go that route.
Chris
"ad and popup image search".
I would buy stock in the popups.
If you do the math, the economics of search engines just do not work out. Over the last few years the amount in dollars of CPU time required per search has remained more or less constant (yes, CPUs are faster and cheaper, but the web is growing equally as fast).
? ? ..... stay tuned.
In practice, each query to a search engine costs about 1 cent. This means the search engine has to recover 1 cent from each user per each query. What is the ongoing rate for banner ad? well, glad you ask: 1 cent for every impression. So assuming you were able to place add impressions in every single search page (which is quite unlikely) you are just breaking even, which brings us to alternative source of revenues.
All of these alternative source of revenues so far boil down to two types:
(1) charge for doing searchers
(2) charge for the listings
There are two ways to charge for doing searches: one is subscription service for users, the other is to license the search technology for third parties. A surprising discovery of the information revolution is that the value of an invidual item is incredibly low, as the editors of Salon magazine, brill's content or Slate can attest to. Therefore users are not likely to jump in and pay for searchers.
If you license the search engine to a company the same effect comes into play: most companies do not own valuable enough information to justify the cost of a search engine.
So (1) is not working how about (2)?
Charge for listings has been tried in many different ways: skewed rankings, faster and more frequent crawling, directory insertion. Skewed rankings is a non-starter as it drives users away (even so, every so often the search-engine-near-bankruptcy-du-jour goes that way).
Charging for frequent crawling works but not many companies sign for it.
So (2) didn't work either, which leaves most search engines struggling to keep afloat. Now here comes the interesting part: as the web continues to grow, the original search engine architecture starts to show its defficiencies.
Rearchitecting an entire search engine live is a major endeavour, with software and hardware costs well into the tens of millions of dollars, but we just said that the search engine company was barely keeping afloat! So they are unable to rev-up into the new generation.
The only group of people who can secure tens of millions of dollars is a startup backed by a bunch of hot shots from academia/industry lab. In comes the upstart out goes the old, monolithic giant. You can tell that story many times over just by changing the names:
Lycos--OpenText--AltaVista--Hotbot--Google--???
We hear about google selling out. Check out the rejected stories at <A href="http://www.keepersoflists.org/index.php?lid<nobr>=<wbr></wbr></nobr> 637"> slashdot </A>
Oops, that link doesn't point to the correct URL. Here is what I was talking about.
Before long we're have to pay to access anything on Google. And I understand those of you that say that Google is a company, and thus deserves payment for their service. But how many of you would be willing to pay for Google even if a subsription service had ads? Where do I get such an idea? From cable TV of course. The original idea was to have TV without ads, but we all know what happened to that. You pay $30/month, and you still put up with advertising. I think the same is going to be said about online service. You'll pay them money, but once they have your money, what is to stop them from increasing their bottom line by getting advertisers and ugly popup/must-click-here-to-see-content style adversting?
Google works so well for me that I'd have no problem paying a few extra bucks to use it, even if they kept the ads in their current form intact.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
More GREEDY BS from a company riding high on the hog during an economic downturn! Google, I have a message for you: If you try to charge me, I will stop using your site. It's really as simple as that! There is no excuse for trying to capitalize on the "new phase" of the Net, in which companies start trying to charge for services that used to be free. Frankly, I think it's a despicable and opportunistic ploy, one which will lead to the downfall of what is admittedly a pretty good search engine. To reiterate: Google, if you try to charge me, I will leave and NEVER come back!
No one is going to pay for a seach engine. I spend 10 hours a day online (for my job ..really i sware...) and i would never evan think of paying for a seach engine.
,but not that much. Not that much.
Google may be a little better then some other
Cruise TT
for a search engine, it had better to substring and special character string matching.
.6 seconds for google to bring back pages I had to remember half the text to, just to get them in the top half of the search.
Fast really doesn't matter, if you already have to know the exact pages you want to look at. Looking up error codes, string, numbers and the like is next to impossible with google.
I'd rather wait for the old deja to take a full second to bring back results I could use, rather than
Hi my little fried! Hello! How are you? Talk with me! Talk with me!
making a search engine that searches for substrings, or special characters.
The spider technology is good, the search engine sort of sucks.
Sure it is fast, they don't search for anything. You have to rememeber whole paragraphs of text to find a good match.
Especially in news searches, they have nothing over the old deja. If you are looking for obscure error codes, dmesg lines, and the like, google just plain sucks.
OK, raise your hand if you'd trust Slashdot with your credit card information. Heh... heh heh. ha HA BWAHAHHAHAHAHHAHA! Oh, stop it, it hurts!
I'm glad you mentioned having different controls for different groups of users. I can easily imagine jobs where it is impossible to get anything done without being able to install software, and that's not just developers. Sysadmins need to be able to install and test software, too. In general, I would recommend that non-IT people have their boxes locked down tight, that tech support people have the ability to minor changes (new wallpaper or screen saver so they don't hate their job so much), and developers, sysadmins and security goons be given the ability to do what they want, with the provision that their keystrokes and traffic *will* be monitored.
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
we all care about your taste in music.
When I turn on the TV, yes, I expect to see ads. But these ads are relegated to their proper spots during a programming block...they aren't contained in the shows themselves. In other words, I can be safe knowing that I can watch Law & Order without worrying that Jerry Orbach will start talking about how cool the X10 wireless camera is. And when the advertising does come on, I can simply get up and go to the kitchen or bathroom, or change the channel.
When I pick up a newspaper I paid for, yes, I'll still see the ads as well. However, there are no ads on the front page, where the important stories are. There's still ads inside the paper, but they don't interfere with my ability to read the stories. When I'm reading an article in the paper, I know that I'm not going to hit an ad contained in the article itself.
But let's see how it's done online...
I go to a news website, and I'll be hit with active ads before I can even read a story. The ads range from annoying Flash ads (some of which include SOUND), pop-up and pop-under windows, and other flashy ads. Even if I go to read an article, there will still be the same ads in the article. Hell, some sites like Salon.com stuff a FULL PAGE ad down your throat before you can continue. There will be ads dividing the article's paragraphs, of varying annoyance. And if I try to leave, that doesn't stop the site from firing a pop-up window at me when I close my browser!
The difference here is that print / TV advertising is passive. It doesn't try to overtly gain your attention. Internet advertising is active. It tries to get your attention even while you're trying to read an article. If I'm going to pay for a subscription with ads, I will not do it under those premises.
If a site wants my money, I will be happy to pay for a subscription with the ads, provided these two major guidelines are met...
No active advertising! Get rid of the Flash ads and the pop-up and pop-under windows!
Ads must not interfere with story content. I don't want to have to navigate a sea of advertising to read something.
Advertisers frequently say that we put up with ads in newspapers and in TV, which we pay for. That's true. But those ads aren't trying to get my attention every second, even if I'm trying to do something else. Want my money, but want to keep the ads? Make them less annoying.
--
The real Raunchola isn't cool enough to have any imposters
Good post, I agree with everything you said. The basic fact is, people in advertisers are all of the same ilk: They are conniving weasels looking for any opportunity to push their products, even if it means annoying the hell out of people. When confronted, they always say "This is the new reality of the Internet..." To that I say: Bullshit! Who are THEY do dictate what the new realities of the Net are? The best was after Sept 11, when X10 voluntarily disabled popups for a few days. What they were saying was: "To show our respect for those who were affected by the tragedy, we're going to stop annoying the fuck out of you for a few days." What a joke! Advertisers and marketers are ALL anoying weasels!
if they have to charge regular users, no more
than a buck a year.
that plus adverising should give them all the money they need,
If not.... then sorry to say, but fuck em.
Anything that will fund Google to become more of what they already are is fine with me.
Click here or here.
Google indexes the internet, Lexis-Nexis indexes... err... just about everything else.
:) I think you will be suprised at the answer (unless you use Lexis-Nexis).
;)
There are "production" groups in Lexis-Nexis taking old law books by the boxload and putting them on scanners, manually correcting the resulting OCR'd files, and manually indexing them according to about a gazillion different catagories. I was walking through one of the copy rooms and saw some of the old material being copied... it was (as I recall) Fullers original patent for the steam engine.
They also index local and national publications of all sorts, and have the results available faster then I had imagined possible.
Oh... and guess who has more content archived and indexed and available for search and delivery... Google (the entire internet) or Lexis-Nexis (with their own private databases)... To put it another way, which do you think has more data... the world wide web, or the Lexis-Nexis databases?
And you should see their server room
Bill
Mathematically impossible requirements are technically not against policy.
Ooh, I'm starting to feel guilty about that time I tried to come up with the longest (time-wise) search possible on Google.
:-)
What I found most effective at slowing it down was forcing it to actually the common words it normally filters out of your search string (using +, i.e., +this +is +a +him +that), then forcing it to also reject pages that contained a bunch of other common words (using -, i.e. -it -not -am -have).
With about ten each of "+"ed words and "-"ed words, I was able to conduct a search that took 26 seconds. I'm guessing I owe more than a penny for that one
-Wes
$20 a year.
I am willing to pay $20 ($19.95) a year to have unlimited access to Google with their current advertising scheme. It is an enriched service that they offer and it has intense value to me. I would prefer to have it for free, but I also want free cable, free electicity, and free water. Don't get those, so why should I get a free Kick-Ass search engine.
Okay, okay, if I had my druthers and had to pay, I would rather pay $4.95/year.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
Check out their Other ways to use Google Search page which lists:
Adding a couple of spiders dedicated to subscriber's sites (possibly on their sites only for their sites) and some key words that are relevant to them seems a simple and straightforward enough proposition. Indeed haven't all of the other search engine folks been selling off their technology for corporate installations for years?I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I'll be looking for another search engine. The cost was enormous on L-N, the search engine was archaic last time I tried, and the quality of returned searches was pathetic.
Seeing comments like 'Lexis-Nexis, Google's coming for you.' just drives home the point for me that the vast majority of users -- even the technology savvy users on Slashdot often have no clue about how to search and find information. A subscription service is a subscription service is a subscription service. Right?
Wrong. The LEXIS-NEXIS database environment encompasses more than 11,000 databases with data from nearly 29,000 news, business, and legal sources. More than 2.5 million documents are added each week. Most of which is not available on the web and not indexable by Google.
Want an example to further illustrate the point? Try finding any kind of newspaper article from the 1980s on the web. Try finding legal decisions to build your legal brief around. Try getting Harvard Business Review articles in full text. Try finding Microsoft's credit report. So forth, so on.
Nexis, Dialog, Westlaw, Dow Jones, Profound, Dun & Bradstreet and similar services have nothing to fear from Google and the other companies mentioned in this article. They aren't even playing in the same ballpark.
Lots of /. articles contain links to further information. Those that claim to show something of interest sometimes even contain calculations. Or at least, they used to in the old days. Possibly the standard here has sunk even further.
Regardless of that, I'm not going to believe him until he tells me what his results are based on.
Some sites are coming close in terms of some of these things (e.g. Teoma, Vivisimo, and Alta-Vista's Raging. Hoppefully, new sites will continue to give google a run for their money. But right now google is way ahead and continues to improve without adding unnecessary complexity. Considering how much people pay for net access, which will consist of frequent google visits, I think many people would pay $5-10/month for google if google started charging for general access.
Don't bother spending your money with Google, here they are: one and two.
As an extra bonus, if you're a pussy lover you'll definitely have to visit this site. Enjoy!
Follow your Euro bills at EBT
How about personal Google to search my information? I loose large amount of productive time waiting for Outlook, etc to search thru thousands of emails, etc. I would love a fast clean interface like google to just search my own stuff.
Your experience and actions mirror mine strongly. Tossing Java, Javascript, animated gifs, and Flash, and adding Junkbuster, make browsing pleasureable. I also actually notice ads such as Google's keyword ads and the text-only ads that have started appearing in The New York Times's online site.
Ditto commercial TV (and I was also an L&O fan), and radio. I mostly listen to two NPR stations (one news, the other jazz). It's a poorly-kept secret that NPR is at or near the top of many media markets nationwide -- but the commercial ratings services don't mix "mainstream" and "alternative" radio ratings. Kudos to Doc Searls for tipping me off on this.
Commercial stations -- music or news -- just grates. I've largely abandoned the local Safeway with its pervasive advertising (carts, floor tiles, flashing coupon things) and customer profiling for Trader Joes (better food to boot).
I've also registered with the DMA through Junkbuster's opt-out letters -- within two weeks, my junkmail load had dropped tremendously. There are a few additional items I'll get checked off under anti-obscenity rules. Frankly it's a health measure: my apartment mailbox is so small that any substantial quantity of mail means things get folded or torn. Keep those envelopes intact.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
fwiw, AT&T@Home has already partnered with Google, for getting a better search-engine on the support site of the former : http://help.broadband.att.com