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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.
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
Only if the pay service is in fact better than the free service. Offering things like reliable uptime, real people doing support, and greater service (i.e. offering more things and expanded things compared to the free service) will be necessary to stay in business. If people can go free and get a mediocre site or pay and get a good site then a sufficient number of people could pay for the service, assuming it's something they want. Offering a pay service that doesn't do what enough people are willing to pay for is the road to bankruptcy.
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.
A 'vertical search' is probably searching within that organizations websites; a large org, like a university can easily have tens of thousands of webpages and searchable documents, spread out over dozens, even hundreds of large and small servers all over the campus. My guess is this service is aimed at them - it's probably worth a bit of money to avoid having to implement your own internal search.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Yeah, they really will have to add new content to get this to work. Hopely there is enough added value in periodicals, internal corporate materials and other sources to make it worthwhile to people.
What strikes me though is that they will have to add content which can't be available in the basic search. After all there is no reason to pay for specialty service, if what you want shows up as #3 on their free service. In this regard their technology is almost too good, and makes it hard to come up with information that isn't already available for free. I would be very disappointed if they started censoring what material was freely searchable just to put a price tag on some of it.
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
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--???
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?
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.
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The real Raunchola isn't cool enough to have any imposters