That's exactly my point. If you get excessively reductive about any business you essentially boil it down to "they make money". Saying Google is an "ad compan

That's exactly my point. If you get excessively reductive about any business you essentially boil it down to "they make money". Saying Google is an "ad company" is almost as useless as saying they're a "company". If you want to distinguish their industry from others to analyse them, ie. their products, their method of doing things, their reaction to market conditions, etc. then calling them an ad company helps no-one. You reduce them down from search company -> ad company -> company, to the point where the reduction becomes meaningless. It just serves no purpose to state that they are an advertising company, you could say the same thing about a sports team. Their product is search, the monetisation is ads. Just like no-one is watching their favourite football team for the beer ads, no-one is using search, maps, email or their phone for ads.