Google is in a weird spot. I suspect they are capable of doing so much more, but there is a serious risk to cannibalizing their 99% revenue model (search), which they probably don't yet know if they can monetize in the same way.
Unfortunately for them, OpenAI has forced the question down their throat, which I think is exactly what they intended or at least hoped for.
I really can't see how you have come to that conclusion. They could make good amount of money by simple advertising, the way google started out.
The main reason the don't collect anything now is because they are a Hardware Platform company. They make much more than google, without any data collection.
If they wanted to do data collection, they wouldn't harp about not collecting data so long. They would have kept mum.
Just a thought experiment: If Google releases paid version of search where it won't show ads, personalize based on your click-through history and do not copy content from source for presentation, won't share your data with anyone, would you opt for it?
Root cause of most of the issues seem to be monetization model of Google where they are optimising people to stay within their ecosystem.
Googles monetization strategy blinds the results. My guess would be either a way to search beyond google or force it to give results that aren’t manipulated somehow.
Over time, I believe more public non-profit sites will introduce this. Then for-profit sites. Until Google eventually pays for most of the valuable content it gets today for free.
I own multiple sites where I and my users work to produce valuable data (e.g “so so company reviews”, “Is tenet on Disney” and other data of that kind). And what does Google do? Scrap it all and display it on their page. As a result, the page links gets millions of impressions but tens of clicks. Thus, the sites cannot be monetized. Any reasonable person knows this can’t go on for long before the free and open web comes crashing down or Google (and others like it) pays its due.
This is what I don't like about Google. They would like to extract content from others for free and then use it for their own profit. But they don't allow others to extract content from their sites or charge exorbitantly to use their APIs. They give something for free only if they can make money by selling ads or if they can capture user behavior.
I made the distinction between monetizable (yes, they can charge money for it) and profitable (they can have money left over after all the administrative overhead and upkeep). Yes, I've no doubt those were taken in to consideration. I just get the feeling that Google doesn't want to bother dealing with things unless there's extremely large profits to be had, vs just profits. And that's kind of sad, in a way (assuming it's true, but it seems to be).
They have the infrastructure for a fully paid version set up now with being able to buy more space for your google account. Maybe add a client-side encryption option along with no ads. It will make things like server-side search incredibly more difficult although.
$5 a year is a ridiculously low income when compared to advertising. I seriously doubt google would still be around if they had tried to charge users to search the web. Altavista wasn't that bad.
I'm simply pointing out that some services don't really work too well as a 'paid' model.
Also you've got the fact that some of your competition is going to be free. If you want to now charge users directly, you have to be at least 10 times as good, or be offering something seriously different to make them pay.
I'm still firmly in the freemium camp.
1. Make something, get people to use it
2. Grow, make profit from advertising (Stay lean, keep costs low)
3. Once you're big enough, some subset of your users will be willing to pay for extra features
If you instead go for paid only, I don't think you can reach anywhere near the same audience.
I would too, but clearly most people wouldn't, otherwise advertisement wouldn't be such a popular way to monetize apps and websites (and Google wouldn't be the behemoth that it is today). Actually I would also gladly pay for a decent search engine but even DuckDuckGo decided to monetize using ads, which IMO means that sooner or later if they're successful enough they'll become just as bad as the rest.
Besides paying for a product doesn't mean that it becomes privacy-friendly, look at how Spotify still tracks your every actions even when you're a paying customer for instance.
For example, if you simply want an answer, Google itself will extract the top 1-3 answers and present them to you without ever opening SO.
Further, SO has explicitly avoided the most intrusive advertising, further limiting their monetization potential.
The one area where I think SO could have done a lot better was building a better social network out of their website.
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