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.

Comments

How about Usenet?

[uradu]

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.

Re:How about Usenet?

[Masem]

Actually , with regard to stuff before 1995, they're trying. I submitted a story (rejected of course) about 2 months ago that Google was hunting for specific USENET achive CDs, the "NetNews" CD collection from 1992 to 1995. The specifics are here, but basically, they have some, but are missing a lot. They'd rather have the complete collection before they put up pre-1995 articles.

Lexis-Nexis, Google's coming for you.

[duckbill]

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.

Re:If history is any guide....

[dragons_flight]

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.

Slashdot Considers 'Speciality' Subscriptions

[flufffy]

According to this story on CNET, anyway. Here's a taster:

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."

The problem with Charging for Google

[(nil)]

I've long held that if Google charged, I'd be in trouble. "How come," you ask? Well--Google is simply the best. There's nobody else there that comes close.

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.

-(())

The economics of a search engine

[Alomex]

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).

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--???? ? ..... stay tuned.

Re:The economics of a search engine

[ftobin]

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.

I think you're mixing apples and oranges here. You're comparing Salon, which provides content, with Google, which provides a service, namely searching. You can replicate content easily; however, you cannot replicate Google's powerful indexing mechanisms. Hence, Google is the sole distributor of a high-quality service, and I think that they could charge for their service.

Mind you, I think that the cost of searchings would need to remain low (pennies a search), but even at 2 cents a search, they could probably make a bundle (given that you estimate a search costing the provider 1 cent). 1 cent profit on every search is probably a lot of money.

Subscriptions with ads are still bad

[Raunchola]

It amazes me to see how advertisers frequently forget that the Internet and print / broadcast mediums are so different. What works on paper doesn't always work online.

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.