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Google's flagship product is an advertising platform, not a search box.
by toomanybeersies 11y ago
Google's flagship product is an advertising platform, not a search box.
- Kequc 11y agoEven that one feeds ads it thinks are relevant to you
- coldtea 11y agoAnd judging from the quality of those feeds, I'd call it AS (artificial stupidity) not AI.
- esun 11y agoWell it's smarter than running ads in newspapers, which generated a half-trillion dollars of revenue over a century.
- ninkendo 11y agoAssuming you're correct, that means the whole market for google's primary revenue source took a century to bring in what Apple makes in 2 years. Really goes to show how much the market works on the 2nd derivative, and how that can result in immensely disproportionate market caps relative to a company's profitability. If I were Apple I would think about seriously ramping up the stock buyback at this point. If they keep it up long enough they could even take themselves private one day.
- bunderbunder 11y agoEither way you cut it (search or advertising), Google's flagship product's success depends critically on their ability to do machine learning better than other people.
- ehnto 11y agoI would be inclined to say search is still their flagship. While advertising is their monetary powerhouse, it is still search that leads their fleet of products as a household name.
- nostrademons 11y agoWhich, even if true, just proves the thread's point. Ads uses a lot more traditional machine-learning/AI techniques than Search does.
- bitmapbrother 11y agoAnd Apple's flagship product, and responsible for the majority of their income, is a phone trinket made in China.
- adamsea 11y agoI would argue that Apple's reputation for quality design - reliability, build quality, simplicity (though these may be changing), along with first-class industrial and UI design - is what drives their products. The definition of a "trinket" is something that is of little value. Material artifacts with the above qualities have always been of value.
- Reedx 11y agoThis is an annoying meme. Are concession stands the flagship product of movie theaters? People use Google for search, email, maps, etc. And that's what the company was built for. If they had a better way to monetize than ads, they would certainly drop ads.
- msh 11y agoIf that was how they made most of their money, yes.
- rtpg 11y agoSo is McDonalds a drink company? It makes most of its money from drinks... The way a company makes its money is only weakly correlated to the service it offers to users. Think about it: if McDonalds stopped selling food, it would not have any customers. If Google stopped offering search, it would not have any users.
- msh 11y agoGoogle is a ad company who uses search to attract customers. I don't see the McDonald's reference as the same, drinks are part of their food product. Ads are not a integrated part of search (google did not start out having ads).
- ivanca 11y agoSo, if set up a fashion magazine and then I fill it with ads, I'm in the fashion magazines business, or in the ads business? If someone asks, which of the 2 answers would be more helpful to them?
- hanspeter 11y agoIf your magazine starts handling ads in every other publisher's magazines too and then starts handling ads in TV and then starts putting up billboards by the highways, I'd say the answer isn't so obvious.
- sdenton4 11y agoNah, Google is a company that turns protobuffers into more differenter protobuffers.
- jankey 11y agoAnd this is how you recognize a Googler amongst a crowd.
- yunti 11y agoNo the product is search, it's monetised by advertising.