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I know excuses hardly make up for the lack of activity here but the truth is… I’m tired. I’ve been through exams these past weeks, some pretty hard tests, and now I have to prepare my bachelor’s degree, well actually finish the rough draft within about a week or so. In that direction I ask you to please vote using my widget so that i get some reasonable data for my project. As for my disappearance, give it a couple of weeks at most and I’ll be back posting really interesting stuff here 
If everyone helps me out I’ll even post the thesis online here, it’s called “the business model of Google”.
So everyone, get voting! and I’ll be back posting SEO stuff as soon as I can.
And so you don’t get lost when i get back: Don’t forget to 
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June 9th, 2008 at 4:14 am
Would there be other providers who charged a fee? On what grounds would a fee be charged? A successful search that the user uses or just results displayed?
I would want to go with the one that provided the best search results - if this was google I’d go with it based on their past performance, but if it was boring brand x that did a better job, I’d go with that.
If I had to use google I reckon given the volumes people search, a one off payment for a year’s unlimited search would be popular….
Hope that helps!
June 9th, 2008 at 10:10 am
thanks for the comment jimmy, much obliged.
i’m trying to see, using the website, whether Google’s unique business model of not charging for the actual thing they’re offering would work if it were a normal model.
also, for the sake of argument, I’m saying there are no competitors that offer free or better prices or whatever.
so thanks again for your input, it’s going to be very useful, and I hope you don’t have a problem if I quote you here do you?
June 9th, 2008 at 10:31 am
As it stands, with other competitors, if Google started charging for their service I’d divert to Yahoo or Ask! or a version of “OpenSource Google” - that an open source Guru starts in an attempt to copy Google but for Free (like every other great commercial product out there!)
If there was nothing but Google… I probably couldn’t live without search capability, so I’d be “forced” into paying for it. I wouldn’t be too bitter, but I’m not in the habbit of paying for things if there’s a free alternative
June 9th, 2008 at 10:36 am
thanks a lot for the comment Dan, it’s really helpful to see another insight. Also, this is also a personal curiosity as to the worth of being able to search the internet.
But mostly I have to compile this paper and I need some practical data as well.
June 9th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
You could also make the distinction between google search and the other products they are offering…. some people might really really want to buy google maps for instance?!
then next piece of s/w I buy will be whatever comes with the jesus phone!
No worries on the quote if u wish to use it.
June 9th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
thanks again for the reply jj, but i tried that in a preliminary stage and the teacher shot it down, since that would need a lot of debating and i only have 40 pages max…
so i need to basically stay in the whole google search - google adwords thing…
And I instituted the vote to see whether a regular business model would have worked and it seems most people would not be ok with it…
anyway, it’s more of a thing to add a bit of practical research to the whole deal
June 22nd, 2008 at 1:12 am
Exams suck - Hope to see you get some updates soon!