Title makes it sound like Search shrunk, but it's rather everything else grew drastically, especially Cloud. This diversification is generally a good sign, but investors still seem to panic.
A few days ago a Google found me something I was searching for, but via ads and not search. In the middle of searching raw part numbers, the ad became 100% relevant. It was a weird experience clicking on the ad; something I never ever do. So maybe this is a bit of good news? Yardinflatables.com if you're curious.
When we created battle.net at Blizzard for Diablo, there was a bug where the game would launch in full-screen mode and hang, and the only way to escape back to the Win95 desktop was to click the ad displayed by battle.net.
We weren’t aware of this.
The ad company we used notified us of this issue and gave us three days to fix it. Afterwards our click-through rate went from something like 3% to .25%.
Is this how we fix google search? Make advertisers have to provide ads that are actually helpful search results, sort of like https://xkcd.com/810/ but for search ads
I'd be curious how much Workspace contributes to Google's revenue. I don't see it broken out anywhere in the reporting. Assumedly it's part of the $30.7B cloud revenue.
I was just looking in the Workspace account of a relatively small local business, and realized they're spending ~$6k/yr on Workspace. Multiply that by however other small businesse are on Workspace, add in larger enterprise customers, and you're probably at a decent chunk of revenue.
Google is just scared. Google has been scared since November 30, 2022.
Text search is fundamentally a deterministic problem, and squeezing it through a heavy non-deterministic, stochastic engine -- especially through a CoT LLM -- is inefficient from a first-principles algorithm design pov. Also, Google did great search before AI overviews using probabilistic linking and knowledge graphs.
I've been using DuckDuckGo's NoAI version as a fallback, and I've had great results so far; brings me back to the web I remembered growing up -- personal blogs, random forum discussions, and whatnot -- with just a fraction of the page bloat.
I say all this as a HUGE fan of Gemini, Gemma, and Antigravity.
Is it really devastation? It's not like Search shrinked, it's that everything else grew so much. Yes, the landscape is shifting, but Google now has multiple legs to stand on, which should be a good sign to investors.
Search revenue isn't down, both search revenue and overall Google revenue are up, it's just that search is a smaller portion of the total pie because Google Cloud is climbing faster.
“Recently”?? Have people not seen the findings of the AdTech Antitrust lawsuit they lost? Y’all should google it (heheh) especially the ad auction rigging parts of it, including Project Bernanke.
What they’re doing now is just being a lot more overt about it, because they want to carve up their old cash cow to feed their AI ambitions before ChatGPT and Claude eat it up first.
I (and a non trivial number of people I knok) have switched to Kagi for search just to avoid having to deal with the bullshit that is the above the fold google search results.
Course, they win anyway because I also pay for youtube premium to avoid seeing ads..
Feels like the world is becoming a split between people who can afford not to be the product and people who cannot.
They can't juice, because advertisers are now good in calculating conversion rate, roas, cpa, etc, so they would shift budgets to other channels like overnight if see Google underperforming.
There's a reason why GSP (Generalized Second Price) auctions are called "truthful auctions", and that's because they elicit the true value as the bid from the advertiser (in theory).
So (in theory) advertisers will lower their bids if they're not getting the desired value from the clicks; and over time some will migrate budgets to other channels (like "influencers"? shudder ...).
I don't think so. First price auctions are not truthful, and advertisers hate them. But there are 50 shades of gray between a second price auction and a first price auction.... if you get my drift.
Of course the big spenders on Google with the multi-million dollars advertising budgets won't just change their spending behaviour over night. That takes time - like anything in big corporations.
what channel actually provides most of these ad buys that would satisfy their ad dollars?
Google has been sued for being a monopoly, and it's not because they're just really good. It's because there's basically no other market that hits any of the dollar costs.
Wow, that X post is the most succinct but persuasive and damning thing I've read about Google's ad business developments in years (I don't watch it particularly closely.) Thanks!
Gotta love seeing the complaint calling out "exact match (close variant)". Google sure does love text embeddings because it massively increases the keyword-search matches for auctions. After all these years, they definitely have no intention of fixing it for the advertisers.
Random anecdotes like this don't equate to "company juicing their numbers". You need much stronger evidence than that to make such an assertion. There are legal and financial ramifications for lying, companies are audited, there are official forms and documents that public companies must file. Of course a company can lie on those forms, but in the case of a company like Google you need extraordinary, factual evidence to make claims like "they've been juicing their numbers".
You basically have to say, everyone from the CEO/CFO, to the auditors, the financial analysts, the legal team, and all the way down are all lying and this random guy on Twitter is telling the truth. Sorry, not buying it.
See the replies to that tweet. I agree, one swallow does not a spring make; but here there's a pattern. Ask anybody who does search advertising, and you'll hear the same story too many times for it to just be a coincidence.
Most people don't know this, but the Search Advertising auction is a black box. The advertiser just specifies a bid (the maximum they're willing to pay for a click); and the search engine promises that they will not pay more than that.
Here's a trick that Search Engines may (or may not, I plead the Fifth) use: the price an advertiser "i" who bid "bid_i" pays is bid_(i+1) * pctr_(i+1) / pctr_i where "pctr_(i+1)" is the predicted probability of click (pCTR) on the next lower ad; "pctr_i" is the predicted probability of click on the current ad.
Guess who calculates the pCTR? The Engine! In theory, if their pCTR calculations were 100% accurate, all advertisers would pay the minimum bid (which is typically $0.01)! Clearly, this is not desirable. So Engines juice the revenue by tweaking these pCTR values. Talk to anybody who works on auction mechanisms at a search engine, and you'll hear stories of how they tweaked these pCTR values.
In this context it's being used as tantamount to lying. "Juicing the numbers" implies that something is being misrepresented which is a form of lying.
Yes I read the post (please refer to HN guidelines on asking if people read something) and didn't find anything worthwhile there which is why I mentioned what I did.
Posting here for others asking about lying/juicing since I'm rate limited.
~~~~~
Lying on financial statements is in fact illegal. Juicing implies that some number is being misrepresented as higher than it otherwise would be which is a form of lying and thus would be illegal.
Obviously there are some gray areas - "we changed how we measure this" or something along those lines can be considered "juicing" or just a matter of changing a calculation to make more sense, but the broad accusation is extraordinary and requires much more evidence than some random person on Twitter saying some things. As an investor in Google (individually and through ETFs) it has no bearing on any investment thesis I have because I don't care what random nobodies on the Internet say and neither should you.
Their earnings missed by almost 30%, which is pretty huge in the stock market.
I think the bigger concern is that earnings misses are very rare for GOOG, and historically they've been able to hit almost any target that Wall Street expects. Their past earnings misses were all related to major macroeconomic events (2020Q1, which was the COVID shutdowns, 2022 all year with inflation from COVID/Ukraine + rate hikes, and 2019Q3 with the taper tantrum from Fed rate hikes), and most of them were more in the 5% range. A 30% miss, particularly with slowing revenue growth in their core business despite almost full monetization of commercial queries, could indicate that the golden goose is disintegrating.
For that matter, GOOG has been extremely correlated with macroeconomic indicators since about 2018, which means investors in the rest of the stock market should probably watch out. It's likely we're already in recession but don't know it.
OI isn’t more “actual” than EPS. I remember back when Yahoo traded for less than cash and liquids [1] because investors didn’t trust management not to blow it on stupid shit.
So if I understand it, search numbers are down (because AI is doing what Sam Altman originally saw - AI is a better search engine)
And Google knows it, so why not squeeze the current customers, whatever model AI takes it’s unlikely to be a word matching auction, this model is dead, grab the cash and go.
This is it exactly. Search is steady while GC is growing by leaps and bounds because all AI iniatives require cloud for hardware and GC is a good option for anyone unhappy with AWS or Azure. The graph makes it clear.
Search numbers are down because Google search has become crap.
I know a lot of people which I don't consider tech enthusiasts and they moved from Google to duckduckgo.
Anthropic uses and pays for Brave Search. OpenAI uses Bing(perhaps) and their own crawler.
There have always been alternative search engines. People still use Google plenty and it's AI Overview has gotten a lot better. Probably plenty good for most people.
It doesn't /inherently/ return better search results, but Google is many years into an intensive project to make their search results so bad that even a magic eight ball, let alone a moderately advanced AI, can do better.
Google's organic search results are ranked by quality (including how many people click on them).
AI, generally thinks the best result is what's most common, or average, resulting in decent results, but not the best for what you're looking for.
We notice it when we're looking for a level of specificity google can hit, compared to an ai model. It's why Google's AI search can hit a bit differen too.
The example that comes to top of mind is a search that is not made for search rarely can compare to something as well as Perplexity.
When I'm looking for info that requires careful parsing of a source site, then LLM is faster. If it's something like looking up the hours of a business googling that local business is better imo. Result is fast you get to see the business picture etc
Search has moved on from tf.idf + pagerank at this point. And absolutely they do use things like encoders to produce embeddings that are used in retrieval.
Google ranked the best results, not the most commonly occurring ones.
AI is by default returning the highest statistical percentage of what it thinks you are looking for in a response, which may or may not be a search result.
A fun example is having the AI run a search, and comparing it to perplexity, or even gemini a little. OpenAI is improving, and Claude is pretty consistently not made for comprehensive search.
am i remembering correctly that "google cloud" in the earnings isn't just developer's google cloud bills (that's google cloud platform), it's also basically any product where a consumer or enterprise pays money to google for anything other than advertising - google drive storage, gemini pro, enterprise google workspace plans...
Not quite. Google Cloud is GCP, Workspace and Gemini Enterprise. Consumer products subscriptions like Youtube premium, Google storage and even Gemini (consumer) fall under "Google subscriptions", which is part of Google Services
> basically any product where a consumer or enterprise pays money to google for anything other than advertising
Not exactly - the consumer stuff (subscriptions and devices) falls under services, while cloud covers GCP, Workspace, and enterprise-specific cloud services (like maps etc).
Basically if you pay for it with a monthly sub on a personal google account (including Gemini stuff like Ai pro) it's services.
Others want to nitpick but generally yes, before we had AI, the last craze was cloud, so they shuffled things around to the point that everything was "cloud". This is also how Oracle got to be the biggest "cloud" in the world!
Makes me want to own the stock now that they are more diversified. I will never understand why they didn't want to own all of Waymo but did for pretty much everything else.
Google has been extremely aggressive in growing its Cloud business in the last few years and has been offering big incentives to companies willing to switch from other providers. Looks like that's beginning to pay off as companies start to pay the unsubsidized bills.
Google really had developed only 2 good products(not including acquisitions such as YouTube): search and gmail. Their primary cow to milk has been search. The rest (I.e cloud compute) is not really a moat.
I think we are facing a revolution/rotation where the these companies may start to become just “old businesses”(I.e IBM, AOL).
I don't really agree: it's pretty simplistic to boil Google's history down to two products developed 20 years ago.
I'm not really sure why you say that cloud compute isn't a moat. It's an enormous investment to compete there; there's a reason even large companies buy compute from GCP/Azure/AWS or even if they have their own compute don't attempt to compete. Additionally, GCP has been an enormously successful 'bet' for Google over the past decade.
Google has also turned subscription revenue for their various services into a major revenue stream; it'd be hard to call those various services (Google Drive, Google Play, etc.) anything other than successful.
Chrome doesn't generate revenue by itself, but it certainly drives advertising revenue across the rest of Google's portfolio and was developed in-house.
Finally, it's pretty strange to credit the success of YouTube as a revenue stream with a small loss-making company that was acquired in 2006 rather than Google, who has run it for the past 20 years.
Enterprises actively do not want Cloud provider's services distinguished by anything other than speed, cost, and reliability, because features imply lock-in. They'd rather have someone else's computer as bare-metal and run features atop that.
That's a recipe for racing to the bottom in the cloud space against the other providers, where the wins are very raw: what hardware did you predict two years ago you needed today, what breakthroughs in information structuring have your competitors not yet implemented in their own clouds, etc.
It's raw capitalistic competition, and that's good for consumers... But companies don't want that because it's a path to net-neutral revenue in the long-term, which is not how you put your stock on the moon.
> GCP has been an enormously successful 'bet' for Google over the past decade.
I disagree on this. It's not clear how much money they are actually making and how much revenues are shifted over from other business lines to GCP because GCP earnings growth is / was valued higher than other business lines by the markets.
That's the big criticism on Microsoft, not Google. On GCP this isn't the case, because Google does not have a huge install base of MS Office to give "free" 50% Azure credits (but paying the same) faking their cloud numbers.
GCP has a reputation on being the fastest compute and network available. Also the most bang-for-your-buck (on hyperscalers) ML infrastructure by far (because TPUs)
Amazon is "the default" (and most expensive). Works with everything.
Azure is "Microsoft cloud". It's not fast, cheaper but certainly not cheap, ...
But of course that should be interpreted as GCP being 10x the cost of on-prem hardware (for equivalent storage/performance). Azure 13x or so. And Amazon a solid 20x (mostly because none of their products deliver the performance advertised and because if you buy 1 thing of Amazon, they bill you for 20 different things). Even with the price hikes a server under your desk (not the same, I know, however, once you have 20 servers in 2 rooms in 2 buildings and kubernetes running the workloads it is the same in reliability)
I mean, $11B in quarterly operating income ($33B in revenue) is clearly quite a lot. The only reasonable argument here is that this includes hardware sales (i.e. TPUs), but it is still a lot even if you subtract that. I think many folks internalized the narrative that GCP was an also-ran many years ago (when that was demonstrably true), but haven't updated their priors now that revenue is almost the same as (and may soon surpass) Azure's.
GCP is a joke. Their sales reps are useless, and their customer support is non-existent. They are about 8% of the cloud computing marketshare as a result.
I hate Azure, but Microsoft is at least trying to sell it properly. You get a human you can talk to and their support is responsive (although it's also useless).
> Finally, it's pretty strange to credit the success of YouTube as a revenue stream with a small loss-making company that was acquired in 2006 rather than Google, who has run it for the past 20 years.
As a Youtube user, I don't really see any improvements in it (aside from technical ones) compared to 10 years ago.
Most of the improvements have been keeping it running in the face of being the place everyone stores and retrieves video, and that's a lot of invisible work (but is the real reason you don't really see working YouTube competitors; it's a technically challenging big-iron problem).
I’m sure with Chrome,
Google has smart people calculating the value of the data that they get from it. It doesn’t make money directly but it’s gotta be a huge money maker.
Chrome logs every site you visit with the mothership, and that is very valuable data to Google. That allows them to spot, in realtime, trending sites for example. They see what the users are doing on the Internet in realtime and act accordingly.
It’s 2026, I would absolutely say Google “Developed” Google Maps and Android even if they did not “create” it originally. At what point can we attribute the success of these products to Google as a developer instead of Google the buyer.
Android had a market share of 0, with no released products when they bought it. The 80%+ market share today was all Google.
Google Maps was purchased (pre Google IPO), but the original (“Where2”) was a desktop application. Google completed rebuilt it alongside the acquisition of other data sources, and released the web page. Years later, they built a mobile app which became one of the biggest apps of all time. Should we not attribute that success to Google instead of the Australian startup building a desktop app?
Look I'm Google's #1 hater but this is just goofy lol. There are multiple buildings full of Android developers, and have been for at least a decade; to say that it's not "made" by them is a huge stretch. Technically all of their products are just ripoffs of Sun & Xerox, right? Or Turing & Church, I suppose!
When YouTube was acquired by Google, it was already pretty similar in shape as a product to what it is now. The biggest differences are scale, the addition of advertising, and ancillary integration with other Google services. The first is a function of growth, the second is exactly what Google would be expected to do to monetize the service, and the third is another logical implication of "acquisition". (You could quibble and say they added vertical shorts and live video, but I don't think those are even fundamentally different from a product perspective from what YouTube was already doing in 2006, just fast-forwarded to adapt to the consumer technology we have today).
That's very different from Android, which was an unreleased prototype that had zero users and was dramatically different even from what ended up shipping as the first product, let alone what it is today. Android at acquisition would be unrecognizable from what the majority of people worldwide are typing on this very minute.
Yes certainly if you discount the 20 years of development, the creator tools, the advertiser tools, monetizing creators, live streaming, completely rewriting the whole thing, etc. Google didn't develop YouTube much.
Are you serious? Just the hardware build Google did for Youtube alone. They 1000x (not %, times) their backbone bandwidth and they're still increasing it. Youtube used to have 2 small datacenters where they were acquired. Now it's 20% or so of half of the total Google DCs.
Why separate out products developed internally versus acquired and growth? There is an almost moralistic element in the tone of “well they just bought it”. Sure, they bought it and grew it into a behemoth, plus what really matters is not the provenance but how much money it makes for them. Plus, it’s reasonable to call YouTube (and instagram, which also gets the same treatment) two of the all time best corporate acquisitions. It’s not easy to buy a company and grow it like that.
Not a moat and not big but... for SMEs "Google Workspace" is a godsend from outter space.
This is what allow little SMEs to not have to suffer that piece of shit that Windows is. I know people running their SMEs (and I helped them set up Google Workspace) from Mac and Chromebooks since years and years and who do not ever want to here again from anything Microsoft.
They're basically doing everything inside "Google Workspace" (formerly "G Suite", formerly "Google apps for domain" because Google's product naming is just confusing).
Gemini is also IMO excellent for everything that is not coding. It's really rare that I use Anthropic models (which I pay a subscription for) for anything else than coding.
GMail / Drive / Google Docs / Google Spreadsheets are great for a shitload of SMEs out there who want to give Windows and Office the middle finger.
> Gemini is also IMO excellent for everything that is not coding. It's really rare that I use Anthropic models (which I pay a subscription for) for anything else than coding.
I use Gemini Pro for every day stuff and Opus is much better than it. A lot more features and everything works better, especially in the websites. Gemini is just... dumber overall. I had a project/gem (now replaced by a skill) and sometimes I'd start with them and then veer of course along the way. Gemini would religiously follow the initial context, stupidly, while Opus realized that a good chunk if it wasn't needed anymore after my last prompt and did the right thing.
It's absurd to say that Google did not develop YouTube. They acquired it at a point where it was a galaxy-scale cash incinerator and made it work economically using their superior platform.
When Google bought YouTube, it already had Google Video. Google saw that YouTube had market traction and pivoted quickly, to its (and YouTube's) credit.
Difference is, TV had (has) content in 30 minute chunks. But Youtube has, among others, Shorts, which are often 30 seconds. But still Neal Mohan wants to show ads on Shorts.
On top of these ads, creators are inserting their own ads ("this video is sponsored by ...."), so it's ads all the way down (like turtles).
Before they acquired these, how were they doing? I'll give you a hint: they weren't exactly how we knew them today. Android was literally a concept and YouTube was bleeding money with no realistic path to profitability.
> Everything they make from within flops 99% of the time.
As do all inventions? Of course, you just don't hear about all the failings from individuals or smaller companies that went bust as a result. The important thing is the 1% that succeed are so successful it offsets the losses.
those geniuses that made acq. grow all have big retirement exit btw. Nobody in google worth low digit NW if they have been there for +10Y, so yeah they bet on their work and beat market for several years
That’s nonsense. What about Maps, Sheets, Android, Meet, Chrome, Cloud etc. I don’t even know how you can exclude YouTube. It’s basically something they’ve worked on for more than a decade at this point. The number of google products we all use on a daily basis is pretty stunning.
I don't think the question of "good products" is really relevant here; the important aspect is profitable products. And in that arena, nothing beats the money printer!
They used to have a second minimint in AdSense et. al. ("Display Advertising"), but that shrinks by the year economy-wide as the vicious cycle of data tracking, ad blocking, and paywall dodging continues. Now it's a mere $7B[1], compared to $11B for Youtube (technically also Display Advertising but it gets its own segment now, I guess) and $63B from the money printer proper.
[1] Actual report here: https://s206.q4cdn.com/479360582/files/doc_financials/2026/q... Interestingly, display revenues are slightly up! But still, in Google land, "slightly up" is potentially a scandalous failure. Perhaps they settled into better agreements with big publishers ("sell side") after it became clear that they wouldn't actually be punished for having a Display Ads monopoly, despite losing the antitrust case brought by Biden's DoJ.
For me Google has stayed as the default interface, if I need to ask a basic query (probably searches that don't yield much revenue but keeps me on Google), the results were becoming worse a 1-3 years ago but now the AI parts of Google is now good-enough(TM) that I mostly don't need to go to a separate interface, as long as users aren't fleeing they can probably continue to get paid for ADs (also the if YT ads are included, those have really become obnoxious but probably well monetized).
Not more than accidentally or when actually interested in something that pops up, but as a friend said, I'm not a usual core customer so I've never been the baseline.
The thing they're doing correctly right now imho, is that AI mode is mostly toggled for things that passes a quick questions filter (probably low probability of a purchase, like "global illumination methods" giving a decent overview of the field) while if you just type green shoes it'll put out an assortment of online and local shopping options.
Now if as someone said in the sibling comments, Google is gouging their customers with the new auction model that's another problem, but if I was a shareholder I'd be less worried about an exodus of end users to OpenAI,etc than I was a year ago.
How would you expect search forecasts to be met if most of the time you get "are you a robot" or clanker summaries if you are lucky.
Search no longer works and you are killing your most important product with AI that nobody wants. If search worked like in 2010, no one would use AI answers.
Retail is just a bad business. The ad business is many times more profitable than cloud business because of the margins. Cloud isn’t a money printer when compared to advertising.
There's nothing intrinsic about Google search that makes it a monopoly. Monopolies usually hold their position because regulations make it prohibitive for competitors to form or because they control a rare resource. Google search does neither of these two things. Its just a better product compared to everything else out there and the market reflects that.
You forgot to exclude the "not usual" factors that allow monopolies to hold their position to rule Google out of the group.
For example, non-regulatory attempts at blocking of competitors, which Google does engage in due to their dominant position in mobile (of course, that's also just another better product)
Monopolies hold because companies engage in foul play to hold their monopolies. When Google goes out and pays Apple billions to default to Google Search, that is not a regulatory hurdle, nor is Google using its position as the Android platform maintainer and bundling Google Search with Play Services.
I'm really torn between these two perspectives. You are not wrong about monopolies. And yet, when Google and Apple struck that deal I thought, thank god I will not be forced into using whatever Apple has to offer up as a search product.
"Search" is a borderline obsolete concept. There is no separation between search, AI, information retrieval, knowledge synthesis, information tasks, etc.
Gemini is terrible, it's trash especially after downgrading to the free version. I have to prompt it two to three times for it to understand what I am asking it. It seemed better when I was paying for it while it's free competitor models (the other 4) always answer me right away.
you're not really the ideal customer. They're probably going to market to enterprise people because Claude/ChatGPT will become too expensive when they IPO and won't have any other revenue stream unlike Google/MS.
I get what they're trying to say, but it still seems a bit unconventional to show a line chart where the y-axis is a percentage share.
Here's a graph with revenue in dollars by segment:
https://www.pasteboard.co/DwvXdQj2LXpk.png
Thank you for showing the actually useful chart.
Title makes it sound like Search shrunk, but it's rather everything else grew drastically, especially Cloud. This diversification is generally a good sign, but investors still seem to panic.
A few days ago a Google found me something I was searching for, but via ads and not search. In the middle of searching raw part numbers, the ad became 100% relevant. It was a weird experience clicking on the ad; something I never ever do. So maybe this is a bit of good news? Yardinflatables.com if you're curious.
Google are removing vast amounts of pages from their search indexes, leaving only "primary sources" that AI chat can reference.
So if you have a long-tail page ("obscure part number") then the only way to show it is buying an ad for it.
Is this related to the fact that I'm regularly unable to find many github repos via google?
A questionable move on Google's part, if true. Can you share any evidence?
I’ve always wondered what % of ad clicks are just misclicks.
When we created battle.net at Blizzard for Diablo, there was a bug where the game would launch in full-screen mode and hang, and the only way to escape back to the Win95 desktop was to click the ad displayed by battle.net.
We weren’t aware of this.
The ad company we used notified us of this issue and gave us three days to fix it. Afterwards our click-through rate went from something like 3% to .25%.
"All clicks are click fraud" is related to the dead internet theory.
I get what you're saying, but fraud is different from accidents by otherwise real people.
Is this how we fix google search? Make advertisers have to provide ads that are actually helpful search results, sort of like https://xkcd.com/810/ but for search ads
Fascinating; they must be bidding on the part numbers as search keywords.
Now I wonder what the median CPC is for part numbers (I’d guess very cheap), and which one is the most expensive (no idea, super curious).
the bigger question is why the heck did you use Google, was it only after you exhausted all other LLM options
I'd be curious how much Workspace contributes to Google's revenue. I don't see it broken out anywhere in the reporting. Assumedly it's part of the $30.7B cloud revenue.
I was just looking in the Workspace account of a relatively small local business, and realized they're spending ~$6k/yr on Workspace. Multiply that by however other small businesse are on Workspace, add in larger enterprise customers, and you're probably at a decent chunk of revenue.
I'm wondering who published "Attention is All You Need" and brought this devastation to Google... Oh I remember, it was Google.
Google is just scared. Google has been scared since November 30, 2022.
Text search is fundamentally a deterministic problem, and squeezing it through a heavy non-deterministic, stochastic engine -- especially through a CoT LLM -- is inefficient from a first-principles algorithm design pov. Also, Google did great search before AI overviews using probabilistic linking and knowledge graphs.
I've been using DuckDuckGo's NoAI version as a fallback, and I've had great results so far; brings me back to the web I remembered growing up -- personal blogs, random forum discussions, and whatnot -- with just a fraction of the page bloat.
I say all this as a HUGE fan of Gemini, Gemma, and Antigravity.
pure text search (the deterministic kind you're talking about) is medieval technology that's useless in a web search engine
Is it really devastation? It's not like Search shrinked, it's that everything else grew so much. Yes, the landscape is shifting, but Google now has multiple legs to stand on, which should be a good sign to investors.
Devastation? Are you and I reading the same financial reports?
Search revenue isn't down, both search revenue and overall Google revenue are up, it's just that search is a smaller portion of the total pie because Google Cloud is climbing faster.
The devastation in question is that their total revenue is up 25% over last year.
This isn't Google search diminishing; Google is serving more search results this year. This is their other ventures catching up to their oldest one.
Google purposely killing the golden goose by forcing all of its users to use the AI overview is a bold strategy.
Somewhat impressive that search share of revenue is 5% down, but search revenue is 12% up..
They have been juicing their numbers recently .... https://x.com/MaxAnderson/status/2080229375773941871
“Recently”?? Have people not seen the findings of the AdTech Antitrust lawsuit they lost? Y’all should google it (heheh) especially the ad auction rigging parts of it, including Project Bernanke.
What they’re doing now is just being a lot more overt about it, because they want to carve up their old cash cow to feed their AI ambitions before ChatGPT and Claude eat it up first.
I (and a non trivial number of people I knok) have switched to Kagi for search just to avoid having to deal with the bullshit that is the above the fold google search results.
Course, they win anyway because I also pay for youtube premium to avoid seeing ads..
Feels like the world is becoming a split between people who can afford not to be the product and people who cannot.
Kagi is great!
They can't juice, because advertisers are now good in calculating conversion rate, roas, cpa, etc, so they would shift budgets to other channels like overnight if see Google underperforming.
There's a reason why GSP (Generalized Second Price) auctions are called "truthful auctions", and that's because they elicit the true value as the bid from the advertiser (in theory).
So (in theory) advertisers will lower their bids if they're not getting the desired value from the clicks; and over time some will migrate budgets to other channels (like "influencers"? shudder ...).
(Doesn’t change the point of your comment, but doesn’t Google use first-price auctions now?)
I don't think so. First price auctions are not truthful, and advertisers hate them. But there are 50 shades of gray between a second price auction and a first price auction.... if you get my drift.
Of course the big spenders on Google with the multi-million dollars advertising budgets won't just change their spending behaviour over night. That takes time - like anything in big corporations.
Big spenders already do not bid on google directly, but balance budgets automatically between multiple platforms and channels base on performance
what channel actually provides most of these ad buys that would satisfy their ad dollars?
Google has been sued for being a monopoly, and it's not because they're just really good. It's because there's basically no other market that hits any of the dollar costs.
> what channel actually provides most of these ad buys that would satisfy their ad dollars?
advertisers decide which channel justifies.
They still bring 250B ads dollars to google search, meaning it provides more than 250B value to them,
so no.
meta earns lots of money too
What other channels? The alternative on search is Bing and it's a tiny market. Then there's display which is total dog shit.
Ads is highly fragmented market, google has yt, display, mobile ads, there are tons of other platforms (meta, linkedin) where you can advertise.
That first price auction complain is bs, advertisers will just stop bidding $5 for top click and start bidding $1.1 in his example to hit their goals.
https://xxcancel.com/MaxAnderson/status/2080229375773941871
Wow, that X post is the most succinct but persuasive and damning thing I've read about Google's ad business developments in years (I don't watch it particularly closely.) Thanks!
If this is true how is it not fraud or just regular old theft?
You should submit this as its own story. This is big if true, so they say (and based on the replies, it is true).
Idk if I believe any analysis piece that has a separate paragraph for every sentence.
can confirm; ive started getting advertisements explicitly meant for dentists
im very far from dentistry
Gotta love seeing the complaint calling out "exact match (close variant)". Google sure does love text embeddings because it massively increases the keyword-search matches for auctions. After all these years, they definitely have no intention of fixing it for the advertisers.
Random anecdotes like this don't equate to "company juicing their numbers". You need much stronger evidence than that to make such an assertion. There are legal and financial ramifications for lying, companies are audited, there are official forms and documents that public companies must file. Of course a company can lie on those forms, but in the case of a company like Google you need extraordinary, factual evidence to make claims like "they've been juicing their numbers".
You basically have to say, everyone from the CEO/CFO, to the auditors, the financial analysts, the legal team, and all the way down are all lying and this random guy on Twitter is telling the truth. Sorry, not buying it.
See the replies to that tweet. I agree, one swallow does not a spring make; but here there's a pattern. Ask anybody who does search advertising, and you'll hear the same story too many times for it to just be a coincidence.
Most people don't know this, but the Search Advertising auction is a black box. The advertiser just specifies a bid (the maximum they're willing to pay for a click); and the search engine promises that they will not pay more than that.
Here's a trick that Search Engines may (or may not, I plead the Fifth) use: the price an advertiser "i" who bid "bid_i" pays is bid_(i+1) * pctr_(i+1) / pctr_i where "pctr_(i+1)" is the predicted probability of click (pCTR) on the next lower ad; "pctr_i" is the predicted probability of click on the current ad.
Guess who calculates the pCTR? The Engine! In theory, if their pCTR calculations were 100% accurate, all advertisers would pay the minimum bid (which is typically $0.01)! Clearly, this is not desirable. So Engines juice the revenue by tweaking these pCTR values. Talk to anybody who works on auction mechanisms at a search engine, and you'll hear stories of how they tweaked these pCTR values.
> See the replies to that tweet
Social media replies regularly confirm all kinds of nonsense.
No one in Google is lying. If what the person in the Twitter post says is true, then everyone at Google is telling the truth, and so is OP.
And given all the replies to that post on Twitter, it sounds like it's true.
I don’t interpret “juicing” to imply illegal.
Juicing is not the same as lying. Did you read the post?
Some of the things he mentions is worse than lying like not complying to spend caps.
In this context it's being used as tantamount to lying. "Juicing the numbers" implies that something is being misrepresented which is a form of lying.
Yes I read the post (please refer to HN guidelines on asking if people read something) and didn't find anything worthwhile there which is why I mentioned what I did.
Posting here for others asking about lying/juicing since I'm rate limited.
~~~~~
Lying on financial statements is in fact illegal. Juicing implies that some number is being misrepresented as higher than it otherwise would be which is a form of lying and thus would be illegal.
Obviously there are some gray areas - "we changed how we measure this" or something along those lines can be considered "juicing" or just a matter of changing a calculation to make more sense, but the broad accusation is extraordinary and requires much more evidence than some random person on Twitter saying some things. As an investor in Google (individually and through ETFs) it has no bearing on any investment thesis I have because I don't care what random nobodies on the Internet say and neither should you.
While not negative, it seems that their total revenue and EPS was still lower than forecast, hence GOOG stock being down 15% today.
Their earnings missed by almost 30%, which is pretty huge in the stock market.
I think the bigger concern is that earnings misses are very rare for GOOG, and historically they've been able to hit almost any target that Wall Street expects. Their past earnings misses were all related to major macroeconomic events (2020Q1, which was the COVID shutdowns, 2022 all year with inflation from COVID/Ukraine + rate hikes, and 2019Q3 with the taper tantrum from Fed rate hikes), and most of them were more in the 5% range. A 30% miss, particularly with slowing revenue growth in their core business despite almost full monetization of commercial queries, could indicate that the golden goose is disintegrating.
For that matter, GOOG has been extremely correlated with macroeconomic indicators since about 2018, which means investors in the rest of the stock market should probably watch out. It's likely we're already in recession but don't know it.
> Their earnings missed by almost 30%
which exactly earning number missed by 30%?..
Earnings per share. Analyst expectations were for $3.01 and it came in at $2.12.
Ok, this one happened because they invested into AI hardware build out. Actual operating income grew 30%+ q/q.
> Actual operating income grew 30%+ q/q
OI isn’t more “actual” than EPS. I remember back when Yahoo traded for less than cash and liquids [1] because investors didn’t trust management not to blow it on stupid shit.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/business/dealbook/how-to-...
google still highly profitable, so operation income indicates how healthy is business, and eps/net income indicates how agressively they reinvesting.
So replacing actual organic search results with hallucinating AI summaries reduced profitability? Oh no!
Is the reduced profitability in the room with us now?
So if I understand it, search numbers are down (because AI is doing what Sam Altman originally saw - AI is a better search engine)
And Google knows it, so why not squeeze the current customers, whatever model AI takes it’s unlikely to be a word matching auction, this model is dead, grab the cash and go.
search numbers are down as a percentage of total revenue, because cloud is up. search numbers are not actually down
Actually search still grew 12% yoy last quarter
This is it exactly. Search is steady while GC is growing by leaps and bounds because all AI iniatives require cloud for hardware and GC is a good option for anyone unhappy with AWS or Azure. The graph makes it clear.
> search numbers are down
Source?
Google Search & other revenue grew 12% YoY in Q3 [1]. In that time paid clicks grew 8% and cost per click 4%.
Across the Google Network impressions fell 14%, with cost-per-impressions growing 14%. (9% of revenue.) But that’s on the web, not search.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/0001...
Yes but search growth has slowed and it’s making less money thanks to AI overviews. An exec called it out in the earnings call.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/google-admits-ai-sea...
I’ve been saying for a while that AI is going to be a bigger problem for Google than many realize: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47957708
Search is not making less money, as the comment you're replying to just pointed out.
Google has been trying to drop "Network" impressions (by moving them to Google owned properties) for close to two decades now.
The only revenue covered by Network is what it pays out to newspapers and other kinds of ad-supported websites.
The article says
Search revenue still grew: the share fell because the rest of Alphabet grew faster.
Search numbers are down because Google search has become crap. I know a lot of people which I don't consider tech enthusiasts and they moved from Google to duckduckgo.
I have moved to Kagi myself
Search numbers were up on an absolute basis.
AI doesn't really replace search engines, it's just a UX layer on top.
Yes, but google makes money from the ads all around the results, which I won't see if I'm using a Claude's UI.
Anthropic uses and pays for Brave Search. OpenAI uses Bing(perhaps) and their own crawler.
There have always been alternative search engines. People still use Google plenty and it's AI Overview has gotten a lot better. Probably plenty good for most people.
AI can definitely be a more natural experience for search, but it doesn't return better search results.
> but it doesn't return better search results.
It doesn't /inherently/ return better search results, but Google is many years into an intensive project to make their search results so bad that even a magic eight ball, let alone a moderately advanced AI, can do better.
It seems this way - however, it's not.
Google's organic search results are ranked by quality (including how many people click on them).
AI, generally thinks the best result is what's most common, or average, resulting in decent results, but not the best for what you're looking for.
We notice it when we're looking for a level of specificity google can hit, compared to an ai model. It's why Google's AI search can hit a bit differen too.
The example that comes to top of mind is a search that is not made for search rarely can compare to something as well as Perplexity.
When I'm looking for info that requires careful parsing of a source site, then LLM is faster. If it's something like looking up the hours of a business googling that local business is better imo. Result is fast you get to see the business picture etc
Search is not analysis like you're describing.
I have started to use the interactive Google summary chat, it's nice to have that initial search result context to follow up on with more questions
Google's AI search is different because they have the history of what right, and quality looks like, it's not just the most common webpages.
Search has moved on from tf.idf + pagerank at this point. And absolutely they do use things like encoders to produce embeddings that are used in retrieval.
It's not about whether it moves on or not.
Google ranked the best results, not the most commonly occurring ones.
AI is by default returning the highest statistical percentage of what it thinks you are looking for in a response, which may or may not be a search result.
A fun example is having the AI run a search, and comparing it to perplexity, or even gemini a little. OpenAI is improving, and Claude is pretty consistently not made for comprehensive search.
Google search results are crap enough that someone only comparing them to various AIs may find the latter more natural.
Yep, that's it. Search results are just such a bad example. AI just convinces you -falsely- it's results are good, but they suck.
It may or may. not try to convince anything.
Often when we use a search engine, we're trying to piece together something that might be across multiple links, or a single link
> this model is dead, grab the cash and go.
[citations needed]
> AI is a better search engine
Google didn't exactly leave us much choice to opt out. I have to use a firefox extension to hide that bit.
am i remembering correctly that "google cloud" in the earnings isn't just developer's google cloud bills (that's google cloud platform), it's also basically any product where a consumer or enterprise pays money to google for anything other than advertising - google drive storage, gemini pro, enterprise google workspace plans...
Not quite. Google Cloud is GCP, Workspace and Gemini Enterprise. Consumer products subscriptions like Youtube premium, Google storage and even Gemini (consumer) fall under "Google subscriptions", which is part of Google Services
> basically any product where a consumer or enterprise pays money to google for anything other than advertising
Not exactly - the consumer stuff (subscriptions and devices) falls under services, while cloud covers GCP, Workspace, and enterprise-specific cloud services (like maps etc).
Basically if you pay for it with a monthly sub on a personal google account (including Gemini stuff like Ai pro) it's services.
[0]https://abc.xyz/investor/faqs-and-general-information/
no, services is broken out separately.
Others want to nitpick but generally yes, before we had AI, the last craze was cloud, so they shuffled things around to the point that everything was "cloud". This is also how Oracle got to be the biggest "cloud" in the world!
Workspace is under cloud but consumer stuff like Google 1 plans have their own line item.
Makes me want to own the stock now that they are more diversified. I will never understand why they didn't want to own all of Waymo but did for pretty much everything else.
Isn't this good news because they're diversifying their streams?
It's not when it happens involuntarily :-D
Google has been extremely aggressive in growing its Cloud business in the last few years and has been offering big incentives to companies willing to switch from other providers. Looks like that's beginning to pay off as companies start to pay the unsubsidized bills.
Google really had developed only 2 good products(not including acquisitions such as YouTube): search and gmail. Their primary cow to milk has been search. The rest (I.e cloud compute) is not really a moat. I think we are facing a revolution/rotation where the these companies may start to become just “old businesses”(I.e IBM, AOL).
I don't really agree: it's pretty simplistic to boil Google's history down to two products developed 20 years ago.
I'm not really sure why you say that cloud compute isn't a moat. It's an enormous investment to compete there; there's a reason even large companies buy compute from GCP/Azure/AWS or even if they have their own compute don't attempt to compete. Additionally, GCP has been an enormously successful 'bet' for Google over the past decade.
Google has also turned subscription revenue for their various services into a major revenue stream; it'd be hard to call those various services (Google Drive, Google Play, etc.) anything other than successful.
Chrome doesn't generate revenue by itself, but it certainly drives advertising revenue across the rest of Google's portfolio and was developed in-house.
Finally, it's pretty strange to credit the success of YouTube as a revenue stream with a small loss-making company that was acquired in 2006 rather than Google, who has run it for the past 20 years.
It's not a moat because it's a commodity.
Enterprises actively do not want Cloud provider's services distinguished by anything other than speed, cost, and reliability, because features imply lock-in. They'd rather have someone else's computer as bare-metal and run features atop that.
That's a recipe for racing to the bottom in the cloud space against the other providers, where the wins are very raw: what hardware did you predict two years ago you needed today, what breakthroughs in information structuring have your competitors not yet implemented in their own clouds, etc.
It's raw capitalistic competition, and that's good for consumers... But companies don't want that because it's a path to net-neutral revenue in the long-term, which is not how you put your stock on the moon.
> GCP has been an enormously successful 'bet' for Google over the past decade.
I disagree on this. It's not clear how much money they are actually making and how much revenues are shifted over from other business lines to GCP because GCP earnings growth is / was valued higher than other business lines by the markets.
That's the big criticism on Microsoft, not Google. On GCP this isn't the case, because Google does not have a huge install base of MS Office to give "free" 50% Azure credits (but paying the same) faking their cloud numbers.
GCP has a reputation on being the fastest compute and network available. Also the most bang-for-your-buck (on hyperscalers) ML infrastructure by far (because TPUs)
Amazon is "the default" (and most expensive). Works with everything.
Azure is "Microsoft cloud". It's not fast, cheaper but certainly not cheap, ...
But of course that should be interpreted as GCP being 10x the cost of on-prem hardware (for equivalent storage/performance). Azure 13x or so. And Amazon a solid 20x (mostly because none of their products deliver the performance advertised and because if you buy 1 thing of Amazon, they bill you for 20 different things). Even with the price hikes a server under your desk (not the same, I know, however, once you have 20 servers in 2 rooms in 2 buildings and kubernetes running the workloads it is the same in reliability)
I mean, $11B in quarterly operating income ($33B in revenue) is clearly quite a lot. The only reasonable argument here is that this includes hardware sales (i.e. TPUs), but it is still a lot even if you subtract that. I think many folks internalized the narrative that GCP was an also-ran many years ago (when that was demonstrably true), but haven't updated their priors now that revenue is almost the same as (and may soon surpass) Azure's.
GCP is a joke. Their sales reps are useless, and their customer support is non-existent. They are about 8% of the cloud computing marketshare as a result.
I hate Azure, but Microsoft is at least trying to sell it properly. You get a human you can talk to and their support is responsive (although it's also useless).
> Finally, it's pretty strange to credit the success of YouTube as a revenue stream with a small loss-making company that was acquired in 2006 rather than Google, who has run it for the past 20 years.
As a Youtube user, I don't really see any improvements in it (aside from technical ones) compared to 10 years ago.
Most of the improvements have been keeping it running in the face of being the place everyone stores and retrieves video, and that's a lot of invisible work (but is the real reason you don't really see working YouTube competitors; it's a technically challenging big-iron problem).
Android, Maps and Chrome I use it almost daily for years. Dont know if are great at revenue, but are great products for me :)
To be fair, the parent is excluding acquisitions:
> not including acquisitions
Of which only Chrome is in-house created. I wouldn't think Chrome brings in a lot of revenue, and these days I'd argue FF is a much better product.
As a FF user, I've had to fall back to Edge/Chrome many times because some obscure hospital telehealth portal or bank website or whatever has issues.
I want FF to be successful, but unfortunately it's not really up to Mozilla
I’m sure with Chrome, Google has smart people calculating the value of the data that they get from it. It doesn’t make money directly but it’s gotta be a huge money maker.
Chrome logs every site you visit with the mothership, and that is very valuable data to Google. That allows them to spot, in realtime, trending sites for example. They see what the users are doing on the Internet in realtime and act accordingly.
I wouldn't call Chrome an acquisition, but it wasn't birthed at Google.
He specified "developed."
Google didn't create Android or Maps. Android was made in 2003 by other people. Maps was Keyhole and something made in Australia.
I don't know enough about Chrome to say.
It’s 2026, I would absolutely say Google “Developed” Google Maps and Android even if they did not “create” it originally. At what point can we attribute the success of these products to Google as a developer instead of Google the buyer.
Android had a market share of 0, with no released products when they bought it. The 80%+ market share today was all Google.
Google Maps was purchased (pre Google IPO), but the original (“Where2”) was a desktop application. Google completed rebuilt it alongside the acquisition of other data sources, and released the web page. Years later, they built a mobile app which became one of the biggest apps of all time. Should we not attribute that success to Google instead of the Australian startup building a desktop app?
While Android is technically an acquisition, it was an unreleased prototype when they bought it.
It's safe to say Google brought Android to the level it is now.
Same with YouTube
When YouTube was acquired by Google, it was already pretty similar in shape as a product to what it is now. The biggest differences are scale, the addition of advertising, and ancillary integration with other Google services. The first is a function of growth, the second is exactly what Google would be expected to do to monetize the service, and the third is another logical implication of "acquisition". (You could quibble and say they added vertical shorts and live video, but I don't think those are even fundamentally different from a product perspective from what YouTube was already doing in 2006, just fast-forwarded to adapt to the consumer technology we have today).
That's very different from Android, which was an unreleased prototype that had zero users and was dramatically different even from what ended up shipping as the first product, let alone what it is today. Android at acquisition would be unrecognizable from what the majority of people worldwide are typing on this very minute.
Yes certainly if you discount the 20 years of development, the creator tools, the advertiser tools, monetizing creators, live streaming, completely rewriting the whole thing, etc. Google didn't develop YouTube much.
Are you serious? Just the hardware build Google did for Youtube alone. They 1000x (not %, times) their backbone bandwidth and they're still increasing it. Youtube used to have 2 small datacenters where they were acquired. Now it's 20% or so of half of the total Google DCs.
That's nothing?
Android, Inc was 100% a Google acquisition from 2005. I thought this was a well known fact?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29...
I... yes, I know. But see the entirety of my comment above, I guess?
To clarify in good faith: what percentage of Android development do you think went on before 2005 in, let's say, mythical man months. 5%? 1%? Less?
Why separate out products developed internally versus acquired and growth? There is an almost moralistic element in the tone of “well they just bought it”. Sure, they bought it and grew it into a behemoth, plus what really matters is not the provenance but how much money it makes for them. Plus, it’s reasonable to call YouTube (and instagram, which also gets the same treatment) two of the all time best corporate acquisitions. It’s not easy to buy a company and grow it like that.
Working with GCP for 6 month now; AWS, with its own weird concepts, is superior. True enterprise.
As a simple example, a week ago we had the GCP outage in UK, their status page said all was good.
Google Pixel / Android are very popular. Chromebooks also did well.
What is Pixel's marketshare, for developed markets? Despite a decade+ of competing, have they made any significant dent in iPhone's share?
Pixels are good, if you replace Google's OS by Graphene that is.
Not a moat and not big but... for SMEs "Google Workspace" is a godsend from outter space.
This is what allow little SMEs to not have to suffer that piece of shit that Windows is. I know people running their SMEs (and I helped them set up Google Workspace) from Mac and Chromebooks since years and years and who do not ever want to here again from anything Microsoft.
They're basically doing everything inside "Google Workspace" (formerly "G Suite", formerly "Google apps for domain" because Google's product naming is just confusing).
Gemini is also IMO excellent for everything that is not coding. It's really rare that I use Anthropic models (which I pay a subscription for) for anything else than coding.
GMail / Drive / Google Docs / Google Spreadsheets are great for a shitload of SMEs out there who want to give Windows and Office the middle finger.
By SME do you mean subject matter expert or Small-Medium sized enterprise?
I could make this make sense either way
Businesses.
> Gemini is also IMO excellent for everything that is not coding. It's really rare that I use Anthropic models (which I pay a subscription for) for anything else than coding.
I use Gemini Pro for every day stuff and Opus is much better than it. A lot more features and everything works better, especially in the websites. Gemini is just... dumber overall. I had a project/gem (now replaced by a skill) and sometimes I'd start with them and then veer of course along the way. Gemini would religiously follow the initial context, stupidly, while Opus realized that a good chunk if it wasn't needed anymore after my last prompt and did the right thing.
It's absurd to say that Google did not develop YouTube. They acquired it at a point where it was a galaxy-scale cash incinerator and made it work economically using their superior platform.
Yeah. I was going to say. I really dislike Google, but what they did with YouTube (whose acquisition I saw as a mistake at the time) is impressive.
aka waited for cost of storage, bandwidth, compute to come down below revenue from advertising.
As it would have done naturally either way
Only if revenue grew quickly enough.
When Google bought YouTube, it already had Google Video. Google saw that YouTube had market traction and pivoted quickly, to its (and YouTube's) credit.
Don't worry, they've put an Advertising guy in charge of Youtube, and he's busy inserting as many ads as possible into each and every video...
People still don't see where this is going.
TV had both 15-20 minute of ad breaks every hour AND product placement during actual content.
That's where we're going in about 10-15 years.
Difference is, TV had (has) content in 30 minute chunks. But Youtube has, among others, Shorts, which are often 30 seconds. But still Neal Mohan wants to show ads on Shorts.
On top of these ads, creators are inserting their own ads ("this video is sponsored by ...."), so it's ads all the way down (like turtles).
> People still don't see where this is going.
At least 30% of Americans use an ad blocker.
Google doesn't pay for transit. Their private glass was the whole reason the acquisition worked.
And putting cache nodes in residential ISPs and exchanges all over the world.
Shhh just let the Googlers believe they’re elite super geniuses when all they do is acquire successful tech like Android, YouTube, and on and on.
Everything they make from within flops 99% of the time.
>Android, YouTube
Before they acquired these, how were they doing? I'll give you a hint: they weren't exactly how we knew them today. Android was literally a concept and YouTube was bleeding money with no realistic path to profitability.
> Everything they make from within flops 99% of the time.
As do all inventions? Of course, you just don't hear about all the failings from individuals or smaller companies that went bust as a result. The important thing is the 1% that succeed are so successful it offsets the losses.
those geniuses that made acq. grow all have big retirement exit btw. Nobody in google worth low digit NW if they have been there for +10Y, so yeah they bet on their work and beat market for several years
That’s nonsense. What about Maps, Sheets, Android, Meet, Chrome, Cloud etc. I don’t even know how you can exclude YouTube. It’s basically something they’ve worked on for more than a decade at this point. The number of google products we all use on a daily basis is pretty stunning.
I don't think the question of "good products" is really relevant here; the important aspect is profitable products. And in that arena, nothing beats the money printer!
They used to have a second minimint in AdSense et. al. ("Display Advertising"), but that shrinks by the year economy-wide as the vicious cycle of data tracking, ad blocking, and paywall dodging continues. Now it's a mere $7B[1], compared to $11B for Youtube (technically also Display Advertising but it gets its own segment now, I guess) and $63B from the money printer proper.
[1] Actual report here: https://s206.q4cdn.com/479360582/files/doc_financials/2026/q... Interestingly, display revenues are slightly up! But still, in Google land, "slightly up" is potentially a scandalous failure. Perhaps they settled into better agreements with big publishers ("sell side") after it became clear that they wouldn't actually be punished for having a Display Ads monopoly, despite losing the antitrust case brought by Biden's DoJ.
:(
Their stock is down 13% today from this news and only up 2% over the last year.
Yeah, diversifying into supporting the Gaza genocide.
https://www.democracynow.org/2026/10/29/sofia_liguori_google...
Pretty remarkable (in the age of AI) that search/ad revenue actually grew 12%. Anyone have a rational explanation why is that the case?
For me Google has stayed as the default interface, if I need to ask a basic query (probably searches that don't yield much revenue but keeps me on Google), the results were becoming worse a 1-3 years ago but now the AI parts of Google is now good-enough(TM) that I mostly don't need to go to a separate interface, as long as users aren't fleeing they can probably continue to get paid for ADs (also the if YT ads are included, those have really become obnoxious but probably well monetized).
But you are not clicking on ads? And they aren't (yet?) in AI overviews?
Not more than accidentally or when actually interested in something that pops up, but as a friend said, I'm not a usual core customer so I've never been the baseline.
The thing they're doing correctly right now imho, is that AI mode is mostly toggled for things that passes a quick questions filter (probably low probability of a purchase, like "global illumination methods" giving a decent overview of the field) while if you just type green shoes it'll put out an assortment of online and local shopping options.
Now if as someone said in the sibling comments, Google is gouging their customers with the new auction model that's another problem, but if I was a shareholder I'd be less worried about an exodus of end users to OpenAI,etc than I was a year ago.
> that search/ad revenue actually grew 12%
it grew compared to q3 2025, but it is flat (0% grows) compared to q2 2026.
I saw a post on X saying Google changed the ad auction pricing model, but I don’t know much about this to comment if it’s accurate.
This post? https://x.com/MaxAnderson/status/2080229375773941871
That post is shocking and probably deserves its own HackerNews discussion.
Thanks, this does make sense.
So do you think this will be the continue trends of Google's search engine will be less portion of the company's revenue?
Google cloud could've been more if they didn't drop the ball.
Where is AI in this?
Search was $63.4B "Everything else" was $64.2B, out of which GCP was $30.7B
Is AI on the 33.5B remaining post GCP? or within the 30.7 of GCP?
AI revenue is folded into both search and cloud, depending on what exactly it is.
This has been the plan for a long time.
I remember 10 years ago that Google was extremely paranoid about having the whole company propped up on one revenue tent-pole.
How would you expect search forecasts to be met if most of the time you get "are you a robot" or clanker summaries if you are lucky.
Search no longer works and you are killing your most important product with AI that nobody wants. If search worked like in 2010, no one would use AI answers.
Anecdotally, I've stopped using Google search because of the captcha issue. It's a lot more work than using other search providers now.
Related:
Alphabet Announces Third Quarter 2026 Results [pdf]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50280197
Cloud computing is really a money printer right now. Amazon makes more from AWS than from their retail business, it's nearly 2/3rds of their profit.
I mean that's been the case for like a decade (maybe not 2/3rds but AWS eclipses amazon.com long ago)
Retail is just a bad business. The ad business is many times more profitable than cloud business because of the margins. Cloud isn’t a money printer when compared to advertising.
Great, now they won't mind so much when we break Search out of Alphabet, because it's a monopoly... :D
There's nothing intrinsic about Google search that makes it a monopoly. Monopolies usually hold their position because regulations make it prohibitive for competitors to form or because they control a rare resource. Google search does neither of these two things. Its just a better product compared to everything else out there and the market reflects that.
You forgot to exclude the "not usual" factors that allow monopolies to hold their position to rule Google out of the group.
For example, non-regulatory attempts at blocking of competitors, which Google does engage in due to their dominant position in mobile (of course, that's also just another better product)
Monopolies hold because companies engage in foul play to hold their monopolies. When Google goes out and pays Apple billions to default to Google Search, that is not a regulatory hurdle, nor is Google using its position as the Android platform maintainer and bundling Google Search with Play Services.
I'm really torn between these two perspectives. You are not wrong about monopolies. And yet, when Google and Apple struck that deal I thought, thank god I will not be forced into using whatever Apple has to offer up as a search product.
¿Por qué no los dos?
You can have shady corporate behavior and regulatory practices enabling each other.
You can't legally make a crawler to compete with Google anymore, it's explicitly stated in a lot of robots.txt's.
The query logs and “permission” to crawl are both advantages vs startups.
A rational take, prepare to get downvoted to oblivion!
"Search" is a borderline obsolete concept. There is no separation between search, AI, information retrieval, knowledge synthesis, information tasks, etc.
Gemini is terrible, it's trash especially after downgrading to the free version. I have to prompt it two to three times for it to understand what I am asking it. It seemed better when I was paying for it while it's free competitor models (the other 4) always answer me right away.
AFAIK only gemini can retrieve youtube videos (chatgpt free cannot and claude IIRC cannot, plus claude do not have native video processing).
So if you need tl;dw or something to do with YouTube video, gemini is the most seamless
They can just fine (well, probably not the "ChatGPT free" interface, that thing can not do anything). It might just not go through a Google API.
Also, of course, before anyone even realized the game was on at Google, Anthropic and OpenAI already downloaded the entirety of YouTube.
you're not really the ideal customer. They're probably going to market to enterprise people because Claude/ChatGPT will become too expensive when they IPO and won't have any other revenue stream unlike Google/MS.
ding ding ding, I cannot see right now anyone else "winning" AI... I hope for a local future where this doesn't happen but otherwise... yeah