It seems Google is already offering an Ad-free-search API with 5$/1000 Searches.
For your own website, not for the Internet at large.
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If they want to charge 10$/Month, they should do it.
And I have of course no idea on how many I would consider to be a sane cost per search.
I am e.g. a hugh âfanâ of the former idea, to charge for every E-Mail send. That would have prevented most probably SPAM.
I just think, that compared with other paid services today, there would be only a few people to pay 120$/year for searches.
And if you have a look on the Kagi Page, there are 3 Search Examples, from which the first for âbest laptopâ shows at first a result from 2017. The second seems to be from 2012, the forth result already is an Add for Lenovo, which even will be not available from my point on earth, and so on.
So the result is more or less without an real value from my personal point of view.
I do not have insight into Google ad revenue generated from search, may be it is majority , may not be due to the diversity into other services such as Play store, Google Map, etc etc. If, only if (as it is hypothetical), Google proceeds with this alternative business model for people to opt in, the price will be determined by the actual cost and market forces. I understand that Startpage search âboughtâ the search service from Google in a wholesale fashion and re-packaged that to the users. So the cost to Startpage must be commerically affordable.
I have not looked deeper into it, but it seems to be the only API Google is charging for, that I could find on a quick Google Search.
Google Maps seems to have also a API that is charging sometimes, but with a free value and only minor cost thereafter.
And something that is called API Gateway, with the first 2 Mio. free of charge, and then 3$ per Million.
I am not into this, cause I donât program any websites or search engines.
I just thing that the cost charged by Kargi seems to be higher than expected from my site, and I donât thing that a lot of people are paying that high amount for an ad free search.
Requiring a charge for each email sent would have likely made the Internet not exist. Note that at the time email was invented, that was a non-possibility.
Regarding âbest laptopâ, I see what youâre saying. That said, it looks like theyâre trying to surface non-salesy articles first, then focus on places where you can find discussions of the topic (Reddit, for example), then manufacturer websites. That might not be what youâre looking for, but I think itâs better than getting 20 SEO-driven âbest laptopâ pages that are all spun content saying absolutely nothing useful. 
The thing with the API costs is that Google can charge for the APIs at largely a utility rate. Kagi has to charge for the search and pay a development staff out of that amount. So youâre almost certainly not paying $10 for search - youâre paying a couple bucks for search and $8 to fund the development team.
I agree that a lot of people arenât going to pay it. The question will be whether or not they can get enough people to pay it to fund their project.
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Right now, the actual cost of Google allowing you to opt out is the revenue they wouldâve made off of you otherwise. In order for market forces to drive the cost of search down to the âutilityâ level youâd need a number of huge providers engaging in a ârace to the bottomâ. And we just donât have that.
I typed âbest laptopâ into Startpage. Clicked the button, and got a results page with three ads at the top. Went to the first ad, and clicked âWhy this ad?â Hereâs what the resulting page said:
This ad is based on your:
- current search terms
- Googleâs estimation of your approximate current location
Visit Googleâs Ad Preferences page to learn more, block specific advertisers, or opt out of personalized ads.
SoâŚ
Either thereâs something thatâs not âprivateâ there, or itâs boilerplate. But either way, Startpage is embedding Googleâs ads in their searches - so I would highly suspect Google isnât charging them anything. Google still gets to sell the ads against Startpageâs searches, which is Googleâs whole business model.
We had that in Europe with the use of BTX from 1983 till around 1995 when the Internet took over for the public in Germany.
The charge per Mail was 0,30DM per Page, while a normal Letter was sent for 0,80DM.
If you donât want Google to keep your data, turn it off. You also have the option to have them delete it after 90 days or you can delete it manually at any time.
But that was a charge from your ISP, correct?
Since you can get ad free (=absent) for free (=zero costs) not many people will.
For me the tracking/profiling is much more of an issue.
Probably not, having had two servers hacked into and brought to a standstill by the sending of 1,000,s of emails per minute until we shut them down. A lot if not most spam is sent via hacked server accounts
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Yes, if it would be handled with a limit per Month, or on a Prepaid-Base, there would be no possibility that your Server would have send that huge amount of SPAM.
There was no ISP at that time, but yes, if you want to use that term (and I have no better one) then it was charged by the ISP.
Why not!?
You can pretty much stop tracking, if you use the No-Track-Feature from Apple (I am not sure if something similar made its way also to Windows?), and if you are not locked in with Google while you search there.
It was being sent using the native sendmail function in the server by hackers who had covered their tracks very well the only way to ensure they were actually out was to scrap the server so not sure how quotas would prevent things like that?
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If you have for Example, a Prepaid Phone, you can talk as long as your limit is not reached.
There are contracts for Prepaid Phones over here in Germany, where you can e.g. send 150 SMS a Month.
As soon as your Money is used up, you stop talking or sending SMS.
So, if you are sending in a normal month, lets say, a thousand Mails, and you buy the allowance for that in advance, or has an agreement with your ISP that they charge you for that in advance, than you SPAM-Problem would have stopped within the first minute.
These were being sent off an internet server not a phone so I do not follow your reasoning? No ISP involved these are managed servers we rent
A pay as you go solution was proposed years ago. As I recall, rather than cash it would require sending servers to solve a calculation and âsignâ each email with the solution. Thus requiring spammers to use more servers and raise their costs. The problem with email is getting everyone in the world to agree to changes in the system.
I think the point being made is that you can block all emails going out over a certain number per time limit. If your normal usage is 1,000 emails per month and you set that as a limit a spam sending 1,000 emails from your server in one minute would active your limit block and you would receive a send message error and the admin a limit reached notification.