Business Google considers charging for AI-powered search - Would you pay to use a search engine?

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Proposals would mark first time any of the software group’s core product falls behind a paywall​

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Google began testing an experimental AI-powered search service in May, presenting more detailed answers to queries while continuing to present users with links to further information and advertising © FT montage/Getty Images/Dreamstime

Madhumita Murgia in London and Richard Waters in San Diego
YESTERDAY

Google is considering charging for new “premium” features powered by generative artificial intelligence, in what would be the biggest ever shake-up of its search business.

The proposed revamp to its cash cow search engine would mark the first time the company has put any of its core product behind a paywall, and shows it is still grappling with a technology that threatens its advertising business, almost a year and a half after the debut of ChatGPT.

Google is looking at options including adding certain AI-powered search features to its premium subscription services, which already offer access to its new Gemini AI assistant in Gmail and Docs, according to three people with knowledge of its plans.

Engineers are developing the technology needed to deploy the service but executives have not yet made a final decision on whether or when to launch it, one of the people said.

Google’s traditional search engine would remain free of charge, while ads would continue to appear alongside search results even for subscribers.

But charging would represent the first time that Google — which for many years offered free consumer services funded entirely by advertising — has made people pay for enhancements to its core search product.

Google reported $175bn in revenue from search and related ads last year, more than half its total sales, posing a conundrum for the company over how to embrace the latest AI innovations while preserving its biggest profit driver.

Since November 2022, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT, Google has been scrambling to respond to the competitive threat posed by the wildly popular chatbot. ChatGPT can give quick and complete answers to many questions, threatening to render redundant a traditional search engine’s list of links, and the lucrative ads that appear alongside them.

Google began testing an experimental AI-powered search service in May last year, presenting more detailed answers to queries while also continuing to present users with links to further information and advertising. However, it has been slow to add any of the features from what it calls its “Search Generative Experience” experiment to its main search engine.

These kinds of search results, which include an “AI-powered snapshot”, are more costly for Google to serve up than its traditional responses because generative AI consumes a lot more computing resources. It has offered access to SGE to only a select few users, including some subscribers to its Google One bundle that offers benefits such as extra cloud storage for a monthly fee.

Microsoft, which has an expansive partnership with OpenAI, launched improved GPT-powered search and a chatbot, now called Copilot, in its Bing search engine more than a year ago. However, the new AI features have done little to boost Bing’s market share, which lags far behind Google.

Some analysts have warned that Google’s ad business could suffer if its search engine provided more complete AI-generated answers that no longer required users to click through to its advertisers’ websites. Also, many online publishers that depend on Google for internet traffic fear fewer users will visit their sites if Google’s AI-powered search extracts information from their web pages and presents it to users directly.

Google this year added a new premium tier to its Google One consumer subscription service for users who wanted to use its most advanced Gemini chatbot. It has also added Gemini to Workspace, its suite of online productivity apps like Gmail and Docs.

It is unclear how exactly the company would seek to integrate AI-powered search into these paid-for services, which offer different pricing tiers, or when the AI-powered search offering would be ready to launch. Google could still decide to launch certain elements of its experimental AI-powered service into its main, free search engine over time, according to people familiar with its thinking.

Google said the company was “not working on or considering” an ad-free search experience but that it would “continue to build new premium capabilities and services to enhance our subscription offerings across Google”.

“For years, we’ve been reinventing Search to help people access information in the way that’s most natural to them,” said Google. “With our generative AI experiments in Search, we’ve already served billions of queries, and we’re seeing positive Search query growth in all of our major markets. We’re continuing to rapidly improve the product to serve new user needs.”

It added: “We don’t have anything to announce right now.”

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Woah. I could PAY to have page one flooded with wikipedia, wikia, and other sponsored content that the non-AI AI algorithm has been forcing for years now (100,000 results but only four pages)?
 
People who still rely on some gmail as their primary email address need to diversify, and soon.
Google already was a company utterly dependent on their search/advertising revenue obscuring the mountain of failed new ventures, if they're fucking with search now that reveals a new level of desperation.
 
Subscription services considered charging more otherwise you’d get adds. Then did so.

They are going to throttle the normal search unless you pay them, calling it now.
 
6MillionCoofs said:
Subscription services considered charging more otherwise you’d get adds. Then did so.

They are going to throttle the normal search unless you pay them, calling it now.
Click to expand...
For all intents and purposes, Google search is already throttled. It's completely useless, won't help you find anything, and functions as little but a vector for advertisements and establishment propaganda.

So now you're paying extra to get a product which (presumably) is like what Google's search engine used to do and actually able to find you something. Granted, this is the AI which gives you pictures of black women wearing SS uniforms when you prompt "WWII German soldier" because it prioritizes DEI that hard, so you're still getting a shit product, just slightly less shit than the search.

Basically it's the typical "gimp your free product so people pay for subscription product which does what free product used to" that you see everywhere.
 
Gogol isn't worth using for the longest time because of its clear political bias. You'll get wikipedia pages and reddit pages.

That and there's more better search engines besides Gogol.
 
6MillionCoofs said:
Subscription services considered charging more otherwise you’d get adds. Then did so.

They are going to throttle the normal search unless you pay them, calling it now.
Click to expand...
I mean, it was fucking worthless before so what's the difference? If something I searched for wasn't Facebook, Reddit, Youtube or Twitter, it takes about ten tries to find the site I was looking for. I don't know what Google's been doing to their engine, but whatever it is, they've only managed to make search worse and worse over the years.
 
Hey Google - I stopped using your retarded cripplesearch years ago.
If you want me to use it again, you better fucking pay me.
 
Unless the premium version isn't just ads, Wikipedia, reddit, what value does it offer that's worth paying for? Its relevance as a search engine is just ubiquity and name recognition, not being a good product that someone would pay to use. Charging without providing value seems like a good way to get people to move to something else, finally.
 
Google search is so shit nowadays I just use Bing, so why would I even consider a Google AI over Bings?
 
Absolutego said:
People who still rely on some gmail as their primary email address need to diversify, and soon.
Google already was a company utterly dependent on their search/advertising revenue obscuring the mountain of failed new ventures, if they're fucking with search now that reveals a new level of desperation.
Click to expand...

I want to move on from gmail but it is gonna be really annoying to do so. What are some of the decent alternatives?

Actually, this should be a thread on the Internet & Technology forum.
 
thats not gonna work... there are not enough retards who will pay for it and the average user will just use normal search or finally change to other, better searchengines...
 
First thought: Very fun for Google to keep allowing regular search results to get shittier and shittier if this was the problem. Great business model idea, way to "not be evil."

Second thought: I remember using Prodigy in the very, very early years of the internet. It was a big deal. Then they got this ridiculous idea to charge money per email or message sent, right when this brand new challenger came on the market that wouldn't charge per email. That competitor was AOL. "It's only a dime per email, it's not a big deal"...except it was, and this one boneheaded pricing move led to Prodigy's lunch getting eaten by AOL's otherwise-inferior product.
 

We should be begging Google to charge us​

We got used to digital things being free. Artificial intelligence will change all that​

MATTHEW LYNN
7 April 2024 • 11:00am

It remains to be seen whether Google introduces charges for its artificial intelligence (AI) products and, if it does, whether the other emerging giants of the technology follow its lead. Perhaps every question will cost a few cents. We might have to pay extra for longer, more detailed answers. Or there could be a monthly subscription option, covering everything you might possibly want to know.

One point should surely be absolutely clear. As consumers, we should be begging Google to make us pay. Sure, free stuff is great to start with. But it also means everything is driven by advertising until it becomes unusable. Paid-for AI will be far better, and much more useful in the long run – and it is customers that will come out ahead.

It could turn out to be the biggest change of strategy in the company’s 25-year history. According to reports, Alphabet, as the owner of the Google search empire is now called, is weighing up whether to put its AI-powered search features behind a paywall, forcing consumers to pay to use them; or whether to keep them completely free, as its basic search function, email server, maps, and all the other services it provides are at the moment.

Other AI services are grappling with a similar dilemma. ChatGPT, currently the runaway market leader, has a free version and a slightly superior paid-for model, and most of the other major AI tools are opting for something similar.

This is a tough decision for Google. After all, giving stuff away for nothing has worked out brilliantly for the company. It has built a business worth a staggering $1.8 trillion (£1.4 trillion). Its advertising revenues are $175bn a year, mostly from its search engine and other related products. It has been a winning formula, and it will be very difficult for it to change now.

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Against that, however, AI poses two major challenges. We may all gradually stop searching for information and products on the internet, and simply ask a smart chatbot to do it for us. If that happens, Google’s search ads will steadily become less valuable. Even worse, AI uses so much server power and such sophisticated chips, that it is far more expensive to run than traditional web pages. Caught between those two forces, Google may easily find its profits start to get squeezed.

We all like getting something for nothing. The explosion of web services over the last 20 years means that we all get a whole range of incredibly sophisticated products effectively for nothing. We can search for anything we want, send emails around the world, find anything on maps, chat to friends and family on social media, and store our photos forever – and apart from a broadband connection, it doesn’t cost us anything at all. It is, in some ways, a great deal.

The catch was that it all had to be funded by advertising. Over time, search became more and more useless as the answers to any question were dominated by sponsored results. Mail systems were cluttered up by messages from companies, and maps were dominated by nudges towards one shop or another. Meanwhile, everything we said on social media was bundled up and sold as a commodity to be traded by marketers. As a former Google web designer memorably put it, “If you are not paying for the product then you are the product.”

AI could very quickly go the same way. The chatbots will start casually throwing in product recommendations to every conversation. They will hint at different shops or restaurants we might want to visit. They will slowly work every question around to a list of things we might want to buy. Worst of all, they might start guilt-tripping us into donating every time we log on, such as Wikipedia, or indeed The Guardian. And then of course they will keep a record of every conversation and question, analyse your answers and sell the data to squeeze some more revenue out of you.

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That is what the tech giants such as Google and Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, did very successfully with the first version of the internet, and it will be very tempting for them to repeat the trick all over again with AI. If they get it right they could rake in even more billions in revenues.

It would be far better to pay a small monthly subscription and get a better product. If we don’t, AI will go the same way as the rest of the internet and we will all end up as the “product”. Smart chatbots are expensive to run. It is estimated that ChatGPT already costs $700,000 a day just to operate, and that is before you add in all the development costs. As AI systems start paying for the content, as they should, and as they get quicker and smarter, as they will, they are going to cost more.

It was a mistake to make everything free the first time around, and there is no point in simply repeating that error all over again. It would be far better if everyone was charged a few pounds every month and the product got steadily better – and was not cluttered up with advertising.

True, we might be reluctant to pay any charges to start with. We have become very used to anything digital being free. But given the potential of the technology, it is loose change. We should be begging Google, and the rest of the AI giants, to charge us. We will be far better off in the long run.

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