Been using the internet since inception, and now this forum is charging us just to use basic search, claiming goolge is charging fees to use search? I don’t understand, if there’s a simple search bar algorithm (aren’t there dozens like Bing or Yahoo or Duck Duck go etc) why there’s some issue with charging to use google for search? I’ve spent time reading and trying to understand this but … I just don’t. Can’t the web developer just put a search function on their website and be done with it? Isn’t this how the internet has always existed or have I never understood search to begin with?
thnx
In: Technology
A website can just use googles search function on thier own page, you type in, it asks google and filters for only pages on that domain.
Doing that costs google money, they run giant servers all over the world.
So google ask the website owners for their money back.
Ofc you could do your own seaech engine, it would be some manual work and would work much slower and worse than googles, but thats what many others do. Depending on how your forum buld their website there could be other alternative search functions.
(Assume for the purpose of this post that the site is being genuine)
What you’re seeing is an effect of tightening up our fiscal policy. Basically for most of the last 20 years, it used to be really easy to get loans for money, and those loans were super cheap. Because of that, companies like Google could develop things and offer them for free or effectively free (“just send us your data!”) to customers like the forum you visit.
Within the last 5 years, things like the COVID pandemic happened (yes, COVID was almost 5 years ago! It’s crazy!). With that we got a period of inflation, where basically everything was now costing a lot more. The fix for that is to make it more expensive to loan money. Because of that, all of those cheap loans i mentioned went away, and now companies like Google had to justify and profitably run their companies.
It turns out that “just send us your user data” doesn’t actually pay that much, so Google and the like have started charging fees and restricting access to their apps. What you are likely seeing is Google telling the forum that they have to pay $x per transaction, and that forum passing the cost on to you.
If you’re using a Google product to enhance your site, you pay for it.
Usually for things like this there’s a threshold where it’s free or the cost is pennies, but Google has no obligation to let any and every site enhance their own site with a product that Google pays to develop, host and maintain, for free.
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