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
(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.
Latest Answers