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Google had a very reasonable money printing machine as its core business model: Search Ads. * You tell Google what you are looking for. * Google returns a han
by pacala 8y ago
Google had a very reasonable money printing machine as its core business model: Search Ads.
* You tell Google what you are looking for.
* Google returns a handful of ads, alongside world-class organic search results.
* Merchants bid to have their ads returned for specific search intents.
None of this requires the 24/7 surveillance machine Google has ended up building.
- bdamm 8y agoNot true. Ad words is bigger. And to do that, they need to know as much about what you want or what you could want in order to deliver a nice juicy targeted ad. Advertisers can now target not just classes of people, but in fact target specific people, and they'll pay a premium for that.
- aaron_m04 8y agoThat sounds like the original product has morphed into something more invasive than it was in Google's early years. Could Google have kept making enough profit if they had stuck to the original plan?