Ask HN: What would you pay monthly to be searchable?

4 points by thomas536 6 years ago | 11 comments

For $10-20 per month (the rough cost of middle of the road web hosting), what would you pay to be searchable? Your favorite niche vertical like your twitter network, full fidelity search of the glory days of Usenet posts, your bookshelf?

jolmg 6 years ago |

The written content of images and the spoken content of videos on the internet?

Not sure about the monthly-bill thing. It'd have to be content that I'd want to search multiple times a week, and I don't think there's any like that.

Maybe a better pricing model would be a set number of searches? $5 for 100 searches or something like that? That might align better with the costs, too.

thomas536 6 years ago | |

(Yeah the exact billing model is fungible/an example to get people to think in terms of actually willing to fork over money.)

Do you mean you might have a specific and relatively small set of videos that you would like searched, but at a much lower price point (e.g. 10k videos at less than $10/year)?

jamesponddotco 6 years ago |

I would pay up to $120 per month for a search engine that had its own crawler, and was completely open source, as long as it worked with JS disabled.

The crawler is, arguably, the hardest part. We have open source search engines out there, like searx[1], but most of them are search aggregators, and depend on Google, Bing, and a few other established search engines.

[1] https://github.com/asciimoo/searx

jolmg 6 years ago | |

> $120 per month

Though I'm curious if there's an actual market for a monthly-subscription Google competitor, I very much doubt this bid would be representative of it.

jamesponddotco 6 years ago | | |

I do not think there is a market for this — a big one, anyway —, and agree that what I would pay is not representative of what others would, I was just answering the question ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

hyko 6 years ago | |

Is common crawl usable in this context? http://commoncrawl.org/

jamesponddotco 6 years ago | | |

Kinda. The crawler is there, still missing the search engine. Think Google, but open source, and maybe self-hostable[1].

[1] I am pretty sure "hostable" is not a word.

hyko 6 years ago |

I don’t understand what you mean?

thomas536 6 years ago | |

Most searching (e.g. web, email, torrents) is based on ads, which works because of the utility to a huge number of people. There are many things one might in passing want to be able to search (e.g. quickly finding the location of particular book on your disorganized bookshelf, non-web text content, etc.) but don't have mass appeal to sustain ads revenue. And even many of those wants aren't worth paying a few dollars for let alone the cost of hosting search.

So does anyone in the HN crowd have a search-based itch they're willing to pay to have scratched that's not already handled by existing search products?