Google is probably screwed without it. Even if ad-tech isn't exactly a bubble, I strongly believe it is overvalued even still.
Furthermore, the product that made their name is thoroughly lost. I dread Google Search today. If I found something on Google yesterday, I have no idea if I'll be able to locate it through the sea of blog SPAM and SEO garbage tomorrow. Google web search strongly favors big websites when sometimes the page you need is never going to be there. As an example, Google puts heavy weight on near-SPAM sites like Pinterest which produce almost no original content, and on abusive hosts like Fandom (formerly Wikia) who manages to beat out community wikis by replacing admins that try to migrate off and winning in SEO.
I am not trying to suggest Duck Duck Go or Bing are actually better overall, but if I see a web search covered in results like that, I sometimes find that they do in fact give me somewhat better result rankings.
The only thing I really have any strong affection for is YouTube, and the people and content that made the platform special are constantly unhappy with it's corporate direction, not to mention the utter lack of support, claiming and affirming in appeals stupid pointless crap like "you said a naughty word in the first ten seconds of the video" when anyone with working ears can easily verify they did not.
And that's the tip of the iceberg. I think a lot of ventures, like GMail, only ever made sense as computers and bandwidth just kept getting dramatically cheaper. It's difficult to beat free. Well, what happens when those things stop getting cheaper, and GMail keeps getting more expensive to run?
> The only thing I really have any strong affection for is YouTube, and the people and content that made the platform special are constantly unhappy with it's corporate direction, not to mention the utter lack of support, claiming and affirming in appeals stupid pointless crap like "you said a naughty word in the first ten seconds of the video" when anyone with working ears can easily verify they did not.
This is mostly an aside, but it's worth putting into perspective that many of these complaints are related to Google's ads and automatic monetization through ads, as well as their content recommendation network/userbase.
In other words, I think as Google's ad-revenue shrinks (or the bubble bursts), the Youtube ad policies will seem to become more and more draconian, but despite all the anger towards Youtube, the alternatives involve... no (automatic) monetization at all.
I don't think a lot of people are really conscious of how a lot of modern Youtube (specifically the big content creators who have made careers out of Google's monetization options) are implicitly reliant on Google's ad-tech bubble. And most people are pretty derisive of Google's attempts at alternative monetization e.g. youtube premium. I fear when the bubble bursts (or just shrinks a lot), a lot of the high quality content people enjoy on youtube will burst or shrink with it.
I use search for coding a lot, and lately I've noticed it's hard to find what I'm after. If I'm looking for some small thing like what an sftp command looks like, I don't want an SEO essay about why SSH is great and we should all use encryption. I just want the example line.
This seems to be what ChatGPT can give me. It doesn't always work, but it also doesn't beat around the bush.
> I have no idea if I'll be able to locate it through the sea of blog SPAM and SEO garbage tomorrow
If I have to sift through one more useless AI-generated/copy-paste article where they spend half the damn thing explaining the most basic stuff and then still not answering my question (or giving a simple "yes/no"), I'm going to lose it. It's not even just technical answers. I have to basically type "...reddit" or some forum I like to get ANYTHING useful anymore. It's even just basic media questions.
Example: "Is there an [IP sequel] being made?"
First 20 results: "Is there an [IP sequel] being made? Read more to find out. First what is IP? IP was released in 2012. It was made by such and such starring such and such as they go on an adventure to do the thing..." 4 paragraphs later "There is no information on a sequel. Thanks for reading!"
Yes I've learned to spot these as have most folks around here I imagine, but holy hell they will eat 2-3 pages of results sometimes! It's infuriating!
> Furthermore, the product that made their name is thoroughly lost. I dread Google Search today. If I found something on Google yesterday, I have no idea if I'll be able to locate it through the sea of blog SPAM and SEO garbage tomorrow.
You're ignoring mobile + local + timely searches which are incredibly common and very valuable. Google doesn't put "heavy weight" on Pinterest or "SPAM and SEO garbage" there. These SERPs are full of local and useful results and paid ads/placements. This is where Google's interests lie.
By the way sites like Pinterest, dominate Google results, a stranger would incorrectly believe that it is some kind of key "go to" website of the internet.
Instead it's the reason why ordinary people need to learn negated search terms.
-site:pinterest.com -walmart -amazon -alibaba
Devil's advocate, lots of Google services are 100% benevolent. Like Google Open Fonts. Did you know most of the font licenses packaged with Windows, you're not even allowed to package them into a game?
The article doesn't seem to back up its headline at all.
Google is under antitrust investigation for ads, while it talks about the threat to the company being AI. The main point of the article is:
> It would be a lot easier Google could move fast and break things... But with the full force of the US government bearing down on it, the search giant can’t do that now... Google will need to conduct itself slowly and tentatively in order to avoid jeopardizing itself in its battle with the Justice Department.
Sure it might need to move more slowly in its ads business (not a good time to buy an ads-related startup). But I see no evidence Google will need to act "slowly and tentatively" in terms of incorporating chatbot functionality into Search.
So I don't see anything "screwing" Google about this at all, not in the least.
One of the potential issues a lot of people are speculating about is the lower impression counts. For example - when trying to write a script using some api's I'm not super familiar with, I might do 6+ google searches. This will be similar for a lot of fields when trying to find an answer to something, news, other research, etc.
That means you're loading a fresh page of ads every search AND all the ads on those sites too.
With chatGPT (And I'm aware Google has something similar) - I can (and have) just asked it a question, and it will answer/write entire scripts for me. That means there's only a single page load.
Basically people are speculating Google may struggle to monetize a chatbot to the extent they can monetize every single search + site load. You certainly _can_ the speculation is whether the drastically lower impression counts will impact their overall profitability.
I'm not so sure AI is as big a threat as Google perceives it to be; back in 2009 the HUGE EXISTENTIAL THREAT was Social, therefore Google+, but that came and went and Google's growth continued unabated. That said, I do see a place for language-model driven search. And I shudder to think that language models will be specifically coerced, bribed, and have ingrained in their brains only what advertisers want. If you thought the search landscape of the 2020s is fully of SEO'd crap, just wait. Google is not in an enviable position.
I agree about AI, though for slightly different reasons. Google published the foundational paper for some of the most important tech behind the exciting AI stuff[1]. Because there's every reason to believe they are technically capable of competing, the reason they aren't offering AI products is probably based on their beliefs about how practical that is right now (cost / reliability / etc). They also have all their Waymo experience.
Basically, I'm not convinced that Google is "behind" on the tech, but just disagrees about product strategy. Obviously there are lots of examples where this dooms the current leader (Xerox Parc!) - but I think it's too early to say? I wouldn't short them yet imo.
If Google is so afraid of AI, then they should have done the most Googley of things in building AI into Google to get everyone use to it, then drop it. Deprecate the crap out of it like all of the other things. Then, since Googs dropped, it must not be good right? Boom! problem solved
TBF Google found they already owned a first-tier social network. It was disguised as a video sharing site.
The article quotes someone as saying history repeats itself. Debatable. Google built Alphabet to be defensible against antitrust cases like this. Expect a consent decree.
As you wrote: "I do see a place for language-model driven search." And unlike social media this has less dependency on user perception of whether a social network is cool.
I honestly don't think that chatgpt will destroy Google either...whenever I use search engines, I use them to find a website I could not remember the name of, locations like restaurants, etc. ChatGPT will be a tool to be used alongside search engines, not a replacement
It didn't turn out to be existential, but they absolutely lost the Social "war" and it's costing them billions: Facebook owns a large chunk of all ad revenue now, in no small part because of this.
Not that I'm complaining - the less that's under a mega-conglomerate, the better things tend to be. But it was and is a gigantic failure for Google, possibly their largest ever.
But Alphabet will probably be fine. YouTube and Android are still billion-user products that aren't being displaced with AI, and their advertising business doesn't seem threatened much by this either.
So what's the scoop? I use ChatGPT, it hasn't replaced my search engine. They're insisting that search is obsoleted with AI (and Google is spooked internally) but I have yet to see any research-based evidence supporting it. Personally, I use both tools for completely different things, and while they are similar by-way-of a text box with a prompt, their responses are completely distinct and neither one can replace the other.
I recently asked gpt to give me a markdown table of the continents, their landmass and their populations. I checked the numbers and they matched wikipedia.
No tech invention ever kicked out the previous iteration. Google and ChatGPT will co-exist. Same way faxes are still alive even if mobile telephony conquered the world.
What will happen is that new use cases will be set in place.
Some people might head to Google for diversity of results. Others will prefer ChatGPT for one single search result.
In my opinion, only the "I'm feeling lucky" function on Google will be challenged or replaced.
How can a tech journalist imagine that noobs will modify the default search engine on their Chrome browser and Android smartphones? These guys are not realistic.
The point made by the article is that these big lawsuits distracted management. And Google's management is so ineffective today, imagine how much worse it would be with this crowbar poked in.
> But Alphabet will probably be fine. YouTube and Android are still...
If you look at a revenue breakdown[1] and then also figure in that search has much higher margins than the other areas, it's pretty skewed to search dollars. They've improved it some, but there's a long way to go.
YouTube being a billion user product has nothing to do with how successful they are. My free service of "Contact me and I will give you a dollar" can grow to billions of users if you borrow enough money, and don't care at all about actually making it back.
AI is not the issue here. There is this very large assumption that just so happens to underpin a VERY large part of the tech industry, not just Google. It is assumed that ad spending will always be worth it, ad revenue will always increase, and that the market for digital advertising and targeted digital advertising in particular will always be large enough to support the behemoth that it is today.
But what happens when marketing spend goes down (as it does in a recession)? What happens when customers aren't willing to pay as much for your advertising product (as happens in a recession)? What happens when borrowed money can't be secured easily, and debts come due (once again, as happens in a recession)?
Are people really ready for an economy where user data isn't massively lucrative? Are people really ready for an economy where advertising doesn't pay enough to support the "free" services we take for granted? Are people really ready for a world where free video hosting, free hard drives, free email, free cloud-run office software are not sustainable?
> It is assumed that ad spending will always be worth it
This is mostly true. If it wasn't worth it, businesses wouldn't spend money on it. At my last startup we spent money on ads that were worth it, for us, so we stopped. We also found ads that were worth it, so we spent more.
> ad revenue will always increase
Ad revenue is cyclical, it's often the first thing to get cut and the first thing to come back, but it's always going to be there in some form barring a completely new economy.
> the market for digital advertising and targeted digital advertising in particular will always be large enough to support the behemoth that it is today.
Advertising shifts around from time to time (e.g. print->TV->online), but it seems unlikely that it's not going to be digital for the foreseeable future, and targeted will likely always outperform non-targeted. That's not to say it will stay at any particular company/property/app/etc. but unfortunately at this stage it's probably only going to concentrate and migrate from one behemoth to another like it has for most of the history of the industry.
It's OK if marketing spend goes down as long as digital continues to steal from non-digital advertising. Example: Advertising money spent on barely-targeted billboards and TV commercials could move to digital substitutes. This is some of what Google is trying to do with YouTube purchasing the rights for some NFL games.
> But what happens when marketing spend goes down (as it does in a recession)? What happens when customers aren't willing to pay as much for your advertising product (as happens in a recession)? What happens when borrowed money can't be secured easily, and debts come due (once again, as happens in a recession)?
Typically - what happens is - central banks lower interest rates until they're negative in real yields - and people start spending like crazy again.
Who knows what will happen in the future. But that's been the previous playbook.
Weren't all these questions answered during the great recession, It wasn't easy but Google weathered the storm. Why is any upcoming recession going to be substantially different.
Maybe a part of Google's problem is it's focus on "personalized" advertising.
Simple, context based advertising is much easier/simpler to implement --- no privacy invasion required. It also annoys the consumer a lot less and by some accounts is more cost effective.
Amazon in a ecommerce site. If I go there and search for widgets, I should reasonably expect (and maybe even appreciate) some ads from widget makers. What I don't expect and what I find annoying is ads for widgets following me all over the internet for days; even on non-commerce sites; even after I already made my widget purchase at a brick and mortar --- aka, the Google "personalized" approach.
"Personalized" ads are really kinda dumb --- but apparently Google has "sold" enough advertisers on the idea so they can charge a premium for them.
I don’t understand arguments that say google will be left in the dust when it comes to AI. There’s no network effects like Facebook, it just takes a lot of money to train the models, which google obviously has. Do we really believe google, with all its resources and engineering talent, has no ability to develop something on par with OpenAI?
They also already have best in class AI. Google's PaLM is a much larger model than GPT3 and even larger than most estimates of GPT4. They also have Imagen which blows the doors off of Dall-e 2. In no way is google behind OpenAI and they have access to WAAAY more training data and resources in general. Google just hasn't shipped a consumer or publicly available product with any of it yet.
I don’t think comparing IBM to Microsoft is fair or accurate. Microsoft is incredibly relevant and valuable today, many years after ending its antitrust investigation.
People who complain about Google remind me of the meme “no one goes there anymore - it’s too full.”
Google has a lot of legitimate headwinds, but honestly I don’t think antitrust or AI competitors are them.
The legitimate “destruction” of legitimacy on the internet, thus making Search more error prone is an issue. Closed off ecosystems such as apple is an issue.
The antitrust case is a big deal, but it’s unlikely Google would be broken up due to it.
I made this comment in another thread but I can't decide if LLM / GPT is a seismic shift in search or just a gimmick.
I remember when Copilot came out last year and everyone was up in arms about how it will replace most developers, then the chatter quickly died when people realized that it's not that great outside a few specific scenarios, it just looked like it could kill the SWE industry from people that haven't been inside of it.
Now it seems the same is happening with ChatGPT. While it's easy to draw conclusions based on what you've seen ChatGPT do, I wonder if it will provide long term value or be a gimmick much like Copilot, having a bunch of simple applications but fail at the more advanced applications (which would be required for it to dethrone say Google Search).
Personally I think LLM/GPT will never replace the current Google search, it however will be baked into almost every search engine and allow an "alternative" way to search the web, where you get answers to simple questions right away without having to go to a website.
> it however will be baked into almost every search engine and allow an "alternative" way to search the web, where you get answers to simple questions right away without having to go to a website.
That's what Google does quite a lot already anyway. The difference is that Google directly cites its source and offers alternative links - which is necessary, since if you need to verify the answer with a Google search, you might as well skip asking ChatGPT (or an equivalent) beforehand.
Since ChatGPT is fundamentally trained to do a different thing (word completion), I have a hard time imagining that you can sufficiently coax it into replacing an actual search. But we will see.
I think this is the author's wishful thinking more than anything else. Google isn't going to face some existential threat by Microsoft+OpenAI, at least not in the near term because the biggest chunk of the work to get a good AI response in a search product is retrieving good context to feed it.
How do you do that? Well you need an index of the web and a good ranking algo... oh wait.
Sometimes, I wonder if for the sake of small business and general good, if horizontal integration should be heavily regulated and restricted for publicly traded companies (not private ones).
For example, Apple. Why aren't the software and hardware divisions separated, at a minimum? Furthermore, I might wonder, why couldn't iPhone, iPad, Mac, Audio Accessories etc. be separate companies? Sure, you'd lose a ton of the integration that makes it special... but I wonder sometimes if the world would be a better place. Same for Microsoft: Why can't Windows, Office, Azure, Xbox, all be separate companies? If Windows was an independent company I think it would probably be way healthier for Windows at this point (less Microsoft bloat)...
I feel (just feel) that publicly-traded companies should be forced to pick a market segment and stick to it, and any other businesses that get too large (say, $1B revenue) must be broken off.
Why can't Google compete in AI? They have major AI researchers with legendary experience under their belts, what is stopping Google from building something like ChatGPT to augment their search? I guess I don't understand where the threat is. They have a lot more resources than OpenAI.
Can somebody explain to me the existential threat AI is posing to the search business?
I am familiar with ChatGPT composing reasonable sounding answers to prompts. I get that I could type in "what's the best vacuum cleaner under $500?" or something like that, and both Google and ChatGPT could generate an answer for me.
But I want the best, most accurate answer, not a set of banalities that a neural network has composed to convincingly pass the sniff test. I actually care about the content being right, or as close to right as possible.
I admit freely that I'm clearly missing some possibilities here. Can anyone fill me in?
I think the opposite: Google will do great. Google+Deepmind's ML research groups are leading everyone. While it's true that they are late in getting something like ChatGPT to market, I think it was a wakeup call and it will be good for their ad revenues once they do. When they release it, they'll know much more about users' intent than from a simple search engine query and users will stay on their properties for longer. The concerns about cost are overblown - they don't need to run it for every query.
I tried to imagine an ad in chat output by asking ChatGPT a question and then making up an ad:
Q: What is superglue?
A: Super glue, also known as cyanoacrylate, is a type of adhesive that forms a strong bond quickly and can be used on a variety of surfaces. It is often used for small repairs, such as broken ceramics or toys, and can also be used in crafts and other projects. Super glue is available in liquid or gel form, and is sold in small tubes or bottles. It should be used with caution, as it can bond skin together and can be difficult to remove.
For your superglue needs, you can't do much better than Gorilla brand superglue. Its high strength and quick set time make Gorilla Super Glue the go-to adhesive for a variety of household projects.
Edit: There used to be a radio guy, I believe it was Joe Franklin who blended the ads into his spiel so you couldn't tell when the ad started and left off, so maybe it will be something like this.
A: Super glue, also known as cyanoacrylate, is a type of adhesive that forms a strong bond quickly and can be used on a variety of surfaces. A brand like Gorilla with it's high strength and quick setting time making it perfect for for small repairs, such as broken ceramics or toys, and can also be used in crafts and other projects. Super glue is available in liquid or gel form, and is sold in small tubes or bottles. It should be used with caution, as it can bond skin together and can be difficult to remove.
[+] [-] jchw|3 years ago|reply
Furthermore, the product that made their name is thoroughly lost. I dread Google Search today. If I found something on Google yesterday, I have no idea if I'll be able to locate it through the sea of blog SPAM and SEO garbage tomorrow. Google web search strongly favors big websites when sometimes the page you need is never going to be there. As an example, Google puts heavy weight on near-SPAM sites like Pinterest which produce almost no original content, and on abusive hosts like Fandom (formerly Wikia) who manages to beat out community wikis by replacing admins that try to migrate off and winning in SEO.
I am not trying to suggest Duck Duck Go or Bing are actually better overall, but if I see a web search covered in results like that, I sometimes find that they do in fact give me somewhat better result rankings.
The only thing I really have any strong affection for is YouTube, and the people and content that made the platform special are constantly unhappy with it's corporate direction, not to mention the utter lack of support, claiming and affirming in appeals stupid pointless crap like "you said a naughty word in the first ten seconds of the video" when anyone with working ears can easily verify they did not.
And that's the tip of the iceberg. I think a lot of ventures, like GMail, only ever made sense as computers and bandwidth just kept getting dramatically cheaper. It's difficult to beat free. Well, what happens when those things stop getting cheaper, and GMail keeps getting more expensive to run?
[+] [-] spijdar|3 years ago|reply
This is mostly an aside, but it's worth putting into perspective that many of these complaints are related to Google's ads and automatic monetization through ads, as well as their content recommendation network/userbase.
In other words, I think as Google's ad-revenue shrinks (or the bubble bursts), the Youtube ad policies will seem to become more and more draconian, but despite all the anger towards Youtube, the alternatives involve... no (automatic) monetization at all.
I don't think a lot of people are really conscious of how a lot of modern Youtube (specifically the big content creators who have made careers out of Google's monetization options) are implicitly reliant on Google's ad-tech bubble. And most people are pretty derisive of Google's attempts at alternative monetization e.g. youtube premium. I fear when the bubble bursts (or just shrinks a lot), a lot of the high quality content people enjoy on youtube will burst or shrink with it.
[+] [-] lordnacho|3 years ago|reply
This seems to be what ChatGPT can give me. It doesn't always work, but it also doesn't beat around the bush.
[+] [-] Forgeties79|3 years ago|reply
If I have to sift through one more useless AI-generated/copy-paste article where they spend half the damn thing explaining the most basic stuff and then still not answering my question (or giving a simple "yes/no"), I'm going to lose it. It's not even just technical answers. I have to basically type "...reddit" or some forum I like to get ANYTHING useful anymore. It's even just basic media questions.
Example: "Is there an [IP sequel] being made?"
First 20 results: "Is there an [IP sequel] being made? Read more to find out. First what is IP? IP was released in 2012. It was made by such and such starring such and such as they go on an adventure to do the thing..." 4 paragraphs later "There is no information on a sequel. Thanks for reading!"
Yes I've learned to spot these as have most folks around here I imagine, but holy hell they will eat 2-3 pages of results sometimes! It's infuriating!
[+] [-] smallerfish|3 years ago|reply
> I am not trying to suggest Duck Duck Go or Bing are actually better overall
Kagi is, however. Well worth putting your money where your mouth is and supporting them.
[+] [-] dilippkumar|3 years ago|reply
I’ve had pretty good results with kagi.com
YMMV.
[+] [-] _aavaa_|3 years ago|reply
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi...
[+] [-] paulcole|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quitit|3 years ago|reply
By the way sites like Pinterest, dominate Google results, a stranger would incorrectly believe that it is some kind of key "go to" website of the internet.
Instead it's the reason why ordinary people need to learn negated search terms. -site:pinterest.com -walmart -amazon -alibaba
[+] [-] footlose_3815|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] honkler|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crazygringo|3 years ago|reply
Google is under antitrust investigation for ads, while it talks about the threat to the company being AI. The main point of the article is:
> It would be a lot easier Google could move fast and break things... But with the full force of the US government bearing down on it, the search giant can’t do that now... Google will need to conduct itself slowly and tentatively in order to avoid jeopardizing itself in its battle with the Justice Department.
Sure it might need to move more slowly in its ads business (not a good time to buy an ads-related startup). But I see no evidence Google will need to act "slowly and tentatively" in terms of incorporating chatbot functionality into Search.
So I don't see anything "screwing" Google about this at all, not in the least.
[+] [-] thewataccount|3 years ago|reply
That means you're loading a fresh page of ads every search AND all the ads on those sites too.
With chatGPT (And I'm aware Google has something similar) - I can (and have) just asked it a question, and it will answer/write entire scripts for me. That means there's only a single page load.
Basically people are speculating Google may struggle to monetize a chatbot to the extent they can monetize every single search + site load. You certainly _can_ the speculation is whether the drastically lower impression counts will impact their overall profitability.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|3 years ago|reply
Its under antitrust investigation for lots of things; its currently being prosecuted in the US for ads.
[+] [-] titzer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aeturnum|3 years ago|reply
Basically, I'm not convinced that Google is "behind" on the tech, but just disagrees about product strategy. Obviously there are lots of examples where this dooms the current leader (Xerox Parc!) - but I think it's too early to say? I wouldn't short them yet imo.
[1] https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/08/transformer-novel-neural-n...
[+] [-] minsc_and_boo|3 years ago|reply
Google Assistant dropped a year after Alexa, and Android's reach helped bolster it's marketshare (antitrust investigation or not).
[+] [-] dylan604|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zigurd|3 years ago|reply
The article quotes someone as saying history repeats itself. Debatable. Google built Alphabet to be defensible against antitrust cases like this. Expect a consent decree.
As you wrote: "I do see a place for language-model driven search." And unlike social media this has less dependency on user perception of whether a social network is cool.
[+] [-] danjoredd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Groxx|3 years ago|reply
Not that I'm complaining - the less that's under a mega-conglomerate, the better things tend to be. But it was and is a gigantic failure for Google, possibly their largest ever.
[+] [-] smoldesu|3 years ago|reply
So what's the scoop? I use ChatGPT, it hasn't replaced my search engine. They're insisting that search is obsoleted with AI (and Google is spooked internally) but I have yet to see any research-based evidence supporting it. Personally, I use both tools for completely different things, and while they are similar by-way-of a text box with a prompt, their responses are completely distinct and neither one can replace the other.
[+] [-] SCHiM|3 years ago|reply
Google gave me listicles instead...
[+] [-] daqhris|3 years ago|reply
What will happen is that new use cases will be set in place. Some people might head to Google for diversity of results. Others will prefer ChatGPT for one single search result.
In my opinion, only the "I'm feeling lucky" function on Google will be challenged or replaced.
How can a tech journalist imagine that noobs will modify the default search engine on their Chrome browser and Android smartphones? These guys are not realistic.
[+] [-] gumby|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kris_wayton|3 years ago|reply
If you look at a revenue breakdown[1] and then also figure in that search has much higher margins than the other areas, it's pretty skewed to search dollars. They've improved it some, but there's a long way to go.
[1] https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/how-does-google-make-money
[+] [-] Someone|3 years ago|reply
I think they care waaaay more for billion-dollar products than for billion-user products.
> and their advertising business doesn't seem threatened much by this either.
Is it? What fraction of their ad revenues comes from ads on search result pages?
[+] [-] alexb_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexb_|3 years ago|reply
But what happens when marketing spend goes down (as it does in a recession)? What happens when customers aren't willing to pay as much for your advertising product (as happens in a recession)? What happens when borrowed money can't be secured easily, and debts come due (once again, as happens in a recession)?
Are people really ready for an economy where user data isn't massively lucrative? Are people really ready for an economy where advertising doesn't pay enough to support the "free" services we take for granted? Are people really ready for a world where free video hosting, free hard drives, free email, free cloud-run office software are not sustainable?
[+] [-] efsavage|3 years ago|reply
This is mostly true. If it wasn't worth it, businesses wouldn't spend money on it. At my last startup we spent money on ads that were worth it, for us, so we stopped. We also found ads that were worth it, so we spent more.
> ad revenue will always increase
Ad revenue is cyclical, it's often the first thing to get cut and the first thing to come back, but it's always going to be there in some form barring a completely new economy.
> the market for digital advertising and targeted digital advertising in particular will always be large enough to support the behemoth that it is today.
Advertising shifts around from time to time (e.g. print->TV->online), but it seems unlikely that it's not going to be digital for the foreseeable future, and targeted will likely always outperform non-targeted. That's not to say it will stay at any particular company/property/app/etc. but unfortunately at this stage it's probably only going to concentrate and migrate from one behemoth to another like it has for most of the history of the industry.
(I work for Google but not in AI, search or ads)
[+] [-] xnx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onlyrealcuzzo|3 years ago|reply
Typically - what happens is - central banks lower interest rates until they're negative in real yields - and people start spending like crazy again.
Who knows what will happen in the future. But that's been the previous playbook.
[+] [-] mollusk_bound|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jqpabc123|3 years ago|reply
Simple, context based advertising is much easier/simpler to implement --- no privacy invasion required. It also annoys the consumer a lot less and by some accounts is more cost effective.
Amazon in a ecommerce site. If I go there and search for widgets, I should reasonably expect (and maybe even appreciate) some ads from widget makers. What I don't expect and what I find annoying is ads for widgets following me all over the internet for days; even on non-commerce sites; even after I already made my widget purchase at a brick and mortar --- aka, the Google "personalized" approach.
"Personalized" ads are really kinda dumb --- but apparently Google has "sold" enough advertisers on the idea so they can charge a premium for them.
[+] [-] jliptzin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itslennysfault|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idontwantthis|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] endisneigh|3 years ago|reply
Google has a lot of legitimate headwinds, but honestly I don’t think antitrust or AI competitors are them.
The legitimate “destruction” of legitimacy on the internet, thus making Search more error prone is an issue. Closed off ecosystems such as apple is an issue.
The antitrust case is a big deal, but it’s unlikely Google would be broken up due to it.
[+] [-] _fat_santa|3 years ago|reply
I remember when Copilot came out last year and everyone was up in arms about how it will replace most developers, then the chatter quickly died when people realized that it's not that great outside a few specific scenarios, it just looked like it could kill the SWE industry from people that haven't been inside of it.
Now it seems the same is happening with ChatGPT. While it's easy to draw conclusions based on what you've seen ChatGPT do, I wonder if it will provide long term value or be a gimmick much like Copilot, having a bunch of simple applications but fail at the more advanced applications (which would be required for it to dethrone say Google Search).
Personally I think LLM/GPT will never replace the current Google search, it however will be baked into almost every search engine and allow an "alternative" way to search the web, where you get answers to simple questions right away without having to go to a website.
[+] [-] Sebb767|3 years ago|reply
That's what Google does quite a lot already anyway. The difference is that Google directly cites its source and offers alternative links - which is necessary, since if you need to verify the answer with a Google search, you might as well skip asking ChatGPT (or an equivalent) beforehand.
Since ChatGPT is fundamentally trained to do a different thing (word completion), I have a hard time imagining that you can sufficiently coax it into replacing an actual search. But we will see.
[+] [-] Spivak|3 years ago|reply
How do you do that? Well you need an index of the web and a good ranking algo... oh wait.
[+] [-] gjsman-1000|3 years ago|reply
For example, Apple. Why aren't the software and hardware divisions separated, at a minimum? Furthermore, I might wonder, why couldn't iPhone, iPad, Mac, Audio Accessories etc. be separate companies? Sure, you'd lose a ton of the integration that makes it special... but I wonder sometimes if the world would be a better place. Same for Microsoft: Why can't Windows, Office, Azure, Xbox, all be separate companies? If Windows was an independent company I think it would probably be way healthier for Windows at this point (less Microsoft bloat)...
I feel (just feel) that publicly-traded companies should be forced to pick a market segment and stick to it, and any other businesses that get too large (say, $1B revenue) must be broken off.
[+] [-] jb1991|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] counttheforks|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] warcher|3 years ago|reply
I am familiar with ChatGPT composing reasonable sounding answers to prompts. I get that I could type in "what's the best vacuum cleaner under $500?" or something like that, and both Google and ChatGPT could generate an answer for me.
But I want the best, most accurate answer, not a set of banalities that a neural network has composed to convincingly pass the sniff test. I actually care about the content being right, or as close to right as possible.
I admit freely that I'm clearly missing some possibilities here. Can anyone fill me in?
[+] [-] zone411|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] labrador|3 years ago|reply
Q: What is superglue?
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Edit: There used to be a radio guy, I believe it was Joe Franklin who blended the ads into his spiel so you couldn't tell when the ad started and left off, so maybe it will be something like this.
A: Super glue, also known as cyanoacrylate, is a type of adhesive that forms a strong bond quickly and can be used on a variety of surfaces. A brand like Gorilla with it's high strength and quick setting time making it perfect for for small repairs, such as broken ceramics or toys, and can also be used in crafts and other projects. Super glue is available in liquid or gel form, and is sold in small tubes or bottles. It should be used with caution, as it can bond skin together and can be difficult to remove.
[+] [-] flanked-evergl|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattnewton|3 years ago|reply
And honestly while I was there, there were plenty of jokes about how this was already happening, then Google was the new Microsoft.
[+] [-] hbn|3 years ago|reply
Did the recent layoff apocalypse hit Gizmodo editors too?