Could you imagine if Google charged a fee for you to enter a query into its search box? Back in the old days, you had to purchase a license to search librarian databases (maybe even today). But imagine if Google charged a fee, like a toll booth, to the web.

John Mueller from Google was asked if Google would ever do that and he said he doubts it. Here are those tweets:

Legally, I wonder if Google can even do that. Crawl your content, show your content to people, but charge those people to see content that is not owned by them? I guess Google provides the search service, so they would charge for the search, not the content.

But anyway, it wouldn’t make business sense for Google to do that. People would not pay for it, espesially if there are competitors that do it for free.

But it would make for a great April Fools prank from Google if they let people type a query and before showing the result, Google asked them to pay.

Forum discussion at Twitter.