coldcall - 4:44 pm on Jan 3, 2003 (gmt 0)

Take your webmaster hats off for a second and consider this idea. Think about it as experienced internet 'users', rather than webmasters.

What would stop Google charging users on a pay per search basis? By this I mean Google charging users a couple of cents for every search they do. What is SO awful about this business model that people rarely give it serious consideration?

I hear comments from people that they would change search engines, if Google started to charge users for searching. But that would be stupid of them for two reasons. First Google gives the best and most relevant results and therefore why would you want to save 2 cents and miss some useful piece of information? The other search engines are NOWHERE near as good. Google would have to spend some money promoting that to the average internet user I grant you, but journalists who are often Google converts would help a great deal in that regard.

Second once Google had made the first move and started to charge users for each search, the other SE companies would have to follow suit. (Google's competitors can't do it at the moment because people WOULD move from the second best engine to a BETTER free search engine). Why anyone is still searching with a substandard search engine is beyond me, but the news of Google's superiority would reach even a stupid person's ears when they had to pay.

I think many perhaps most experienced searchers would acknowledge that Google is certainly worth paying for. If you got 500 searches a quarter for $10 would that be too much to pay given how useful Google is? I would certainly pay more than that. Google could obviously come up with all sorts of pricing options like unlimited searches for $100 per year etc. But in essence you would pay a small amount of money everytime you searched.

This model seems to have HUGE advantages to me.

1. It allows Google to stay focused on excellent relevant search results while still IPO'ing the company and showing shareholders and VERY profitable revenue stream. Do the math, assuming the average home user spent $20 per year and the corporate user $50, through a corporate licence.

2. The benefit a user is getting is directly attributable to the money you are paying. When you search for results and get them (even non-results are useful information) you are finding information and saving time over some other method. That is ALMOST ALWAYS worth 2 cents per search even if you are making minimum wage.

3. I acknowledge there is a privacy issue, but there are various ways of handling this. For the paranoid, they could pay in cash at the post office and get a licence number to type into their downloaded Google counter. Personally I am not THAT concerned and would happily pay on a credit card. Any really DEVIOUS searching I would just do at work on someone elses computer.

Initially Google should give users 30 free searches per month and therefore only be asking for money from bigger users. Over time the free searches per month would be lowered until eventually it would tend to zero.

[edited by: coldcall at 7:27 pm (utc) on Jan. 3, 2003]