Last year three researchers at University of Michigan performed a small experiment to see if they could ascertain how much ordinary people might pay for search. Their method was to ask students inside a well-stocked university library to answer questions asked on Google, but to find the answers only using the materials in the library. They measured how long it took the students to answer a question in the stacks. On average it took 22 minutes. That's 15 minutes longer that the 7 minutes it took to answer the same question, on average, using Google. Figuring a national average wage of $22/hour, this works out to a savings of $1.37 per search.
No. It has been free for too long, and there are too many competitors available offering it for free. And they are obviously able to do so without going bankrupt
Experience enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again - Jeanne Pincha-Tulley
Comprehensive is Latin for there is lots of bad stuff in it - Trey Gowdy