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Very much a way to mitigate the FTC's requirements on making advertising more distinct than organic results. It is an unpopular opinion but I believe Google is

Very much a way to mitigate the FTC's requirements on making advertising more distinct than organic results. It is an unpopular opinion but I believe Google is dying. They have been for a long time. The cancer is that nothing other than search ads generates the revenue and margins they need and the margins on search ads are now down 90% from where they were in 2010. Personally I'm long on Microsoft/Bing as a candidate for the surviving English language web index. My prediction (which isn't shared by many so don't be surprised if you disagree :-)) is that once Google's dying becomes mainstream and they start heading into ground that Apple will buy their assets, keep Maps, Search, and maybe Waymo and throw the rest away.

JoeSmithson 7y ago
> "the margins on search ads are now down 90% from where they were in 2010." Do you have a source for this?
- lrem 7y ago
  This is publicly available data, published quarterly in the financial statement... I don't recall ever hearing about that kind of a drop.
- georgiecasey 7y ago
  i presume he means the increase in the traffic acquisition costs like the $12billion (!!) they pay Apple to remain the default search engine in Safari. i always found this baffling business logic from Google. i think Google is a strong enough brand that a lot of people would switch to it if it wasn't the default. maybe not everyone would switch but not worth $12 billion a year
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Buying that traffic bids up the cost of any other competitor doing similarly.
- ChuckMcM 7y ago
  The quarterly financial statements, and a knowledge of how Google accounting works[1]. Revenue from ads is correlated to CPC (cost per click), ad inventory is correlated to ads on Google sites vs ads on "other" sites, and margin pressure is correlated with operational expenses and traffic acquisition costs. The fuzziest number to model is the ad inventory and relies on estimates of search traffic, ads serviced, and reported revenue and CPC. [1] I worked there and paid attention at their 'life of a dollar' class they used to give Nooglers. :-)
ngold 7y ago
As an advertising company, where are they losing money?
birdyrooster 7y ago
That would be a huge mistake for Apple, and I cannot imagine it passing the scrutiny of anti trust regulators.
bruwozniak 7y ago
Funny you say that, I was just thinking the same. Their recent user hostile moves seem like desperation more than part of an evil plan.
corporateslave5 7y ago
Not only this, but they are also no longer near top of the market for software pay.
- typest 7y ago
  What would you say is top of the market then? Google seems to pay pretty highly.
javajosh 7y ago
You're not the only one. It seems like G itself thinks that, hence all the desperate attempts to diversify - which I see as an attempt to parley a short-term cash and talent surplus into something, anything, that will have value in the long run. It will be interesting to see what a desperate Goog might do with access to everyone's email, calendars, and docs.
paganel 7y ago
To be honest I’m not sure what everyone else is searching for on Google the search engine anymore. I personally use it as a Wikipedia search engine in 90% of the cases while 9% is for stackoverflow queries, other than that I get all the info I’m interested in from dedicated FB groups and different sub-reddits. And I’m also a 40-year old guy, from what I can see at people younger than me they spend almost all their web-related time on Facebook properties: Instagram, WhatsApp groups, Facebook private groups (FB the main app is also dying), with TikTok coming strong from behind. All of these are places where Google Search doesn’t have any reach. So one could say that the 2011 mantra “all arrows behind the same big arrow” (or whatever it was) was quite correct, Google+ was Google the company’s major chance of still remaining relevant in 10 or 15 years’ time. They still have YT, too bad they don’t know how to manage it.
- jwond 7y ago
  You might like DuckDuckGo and “bangs”. https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang
  - choathedolls 7y ago
    For anyone reading this thinking "what a killer feature I need to switch to DDG now". All browsers do this natively now. In Chromium engines it's found under "Manage Search Engine". In Firefox it's under "One Click Search Engine".
    - andolanra 7y ago
      My Firefox install has seven search engines by default in the "one-click search engine" options. By contrast, DuckDuckGo has 13000 bang shortcuts. Sure, you don't need all of them, but I use dozens: some of them almost daily (like !w for Wikipedia and !wt for Wiktionary), some sporadically (like !tw for Twitter or !a for Amazon) and some of them only rarely (e.g. I picked up a Pokémon game recently and consequently have used !bulba to quickly search Bulbapedia, a Pokémon fan wiki.) Of course I can add all those to Firefox, but DuckDuckGo already has them set up, and has many more that I can use without thinking about them. I think that still counts as a killer feature.
randomsearch 7y ago
Google’s biggest opportunity is Cloud. They’re playing catch up but with the culture and staff they have, that’s where I’d be focussing my efforts. I think the 2020s will be the biggest decade for cloud adoption.
- GeorgeWBasic 7y ago
  I don't think it is. Their hard-earned reputation for canceling services is really hurting them now. They never accounted for the effect of all the users they've been continually pissing off moving up in the ranks in companies and deciding never to use Google services. The leaked communication that suggests that they could actually cancel GCP doomed any chance that that would be a big player next to AWS and Azure.
  - seppin 7y ago
    > I don't think it is. Their hard-earned reputation for canceling services is really hurting them now I've only ever heard people complain about this on here, nowhere else.
    - GeorgeWBasic 7y ago
      They don't typically complain, but when asked, it's common knowledge among all the programmers at work and all the ones I know. Google can't be counted on. Furthermore, it's tech types who make the decision to use GCP or not, not average Joes who use their other services, so you'd want to look more at places like this for the prevailing opinions.
      - ddalex 7y ago
        > it's tech types who make the decision to use GCP or not Perhaps at startups. At big companies, the call is made by directors and VPs that are well fined by sales people - and that's where the real money is.
        7y ago
jboy55 7y ago
They're just turning the big dial that squeezes more money out of every user. They resisted for so long, but now they can't grow YoY without turning it. It's a one-way dial too, you can never turn it back. Yahoo did this, most easily seen back on Yahoo Messenger, where I believe they fit an ad in 6 point type between two elements. I've seen it at plenty of places that does revenue based A/B testing. You do an A/B test, measuring $ vs User retention. Money goes up, and retention maybe is affected, but over a few weeks, it looks like its the same. So you go on to the next test. Eventually, you find you have to do drastic measures to stop bleeding money. I wish I could say how long you need to measure retention for, but its probably too long for the test to make sense.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  We've reached Peak Google. It's time for newcomers to reinvent video, reinvent search, reinvent email and start all over again.
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
Based off these dark patterns, the penny pinching at Google is real. A company that is penny pinching -- both by spending less on employees, and nickeling/diming customers -- is a sure sign they're struggling to grow. When you to get to be Google's size, how do you continue the growth trajectory of your past? It gets harder and harder to do so. Their offers to engineers are less competitive, YouTube serves tons of ads, and Chrome is going to ban uBlock It's obvious where Google is at: strict monetization. They don't see any further growth, or they wouldn't be degrading their services.
buboard 7y ago
you know why they re dying? because i have to add "reddit" or "stackoverflow" or "wiki" to my questions because google often gives shit results, and the mix of ads and results is hilariously confusing. If reddit and SO wake up and realize how well they can monetize their own search, google is gonna be panicking.
a_imho 7y ago
They are not dying, but the perception has been long changing from one of tech dearest to be critical by default of Google.
AJ007 7y ago
I searched the comments for FTC and yours was the only that popped up. For the record, I don’t think this is FTC compliant. It also reeks of the kind of this that regulators would adjust their laws for. Google is playing with a situation where regulators may write very explicit rules that say exactly how much labeling their ads need. A 50%-75% chop in outgoing paid clicks would be material to their earnings. They’ve been in a situation for a decade where a large chunk of their most valuable demographic had no idea they’ve been clicking on ads. That isn’t a metric they should be getting more greedy on. Regulators could just set up a test where, if a large enough percent of users don’t know they’ve clicked on an ad, paid disclosure has to be more explicit. The low hanging revenue fruit for Google at this point is very sparse. Financially incentivized executives are scrambling to do questionable things to hit bonuses that probably shouldn’t be attainable. Kind of like Boeing.

JoeSmithson 7y ago

> "the margins on search ads are now down 90% from where they were in 2010." Do you have a source for this?

lrem 7y ago
This is publicly available data, published quarterly in the financial statement... I don't recall ever hearing about that kind of a drop.
georgiecasey 7y ago
i presume he means the increase in the traffic acquisition costs like the $12billion (!!) they pay Apple to remain the default search engine in Safari. i always found this baffling business logic from Google. i think Google is a strong enough brand that a lot of people would switch to it if it wasn't the default. maybe not everyone would switch but not worth $12 billion a year
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Buying that traffic bids up the cost of any other competitor doing similarly.
ChuckMcM 7y ago
The quarterly financial statements, and a knowledge of how Google accounting works[1]. Revenue from ads is correlated to CPC (cost per click), ad inventory is correlated to ads on Google sites vs ads on "other" sites, and margin pressure is correlated with operational expenses and traffic acquisition costs. The fuzziest number to model is the ad inventory and relies on estimates of search traffic, ads serviced, and reported revenue and CPC. [1] I worked there and paid attention at their 'life of a dollar' class they used to give Nooglers. :-)

ngold 7y ago

As an advertising company, where are they losing money?

birdyrooster 7y ago

That would be a huge mistake for Apple, and I cannot imagine it passing the scrutiny of anti trust regulators.

bruwozniak 7y ago

Funny you say that, I was just thinking the same. Their recent user hostile moves seem like desperation more than part of an evil plan.

corporateslave5 7y ago

Not only this, but they are also no longer near top of the market for software pay.

typest 7y ago
What would you say is top of the market then? Google seems to pay pretty highly.

javajosh 7y ago

You're not the only one. It seems like G itself thinks that, hence all the desperate attempts to diversify - which I see as an attempt to parley a short-term cash and talent surplus into something, anything, that will have value in the long run. It will be interesting to see what a desperate Goog might do with access to everyone's email, calendars, and docs.

paganel 7y ago

To be honest I’m not sure what everyone else is searching for on Google the search engine anymore. I personally use it as a Wikipedia search engine in 90% of the cases while 9% is for stackoverflow queries, other than that I get all the info I’m interested in from dedicated FB groups and different sub-reddits. And I’m also a 40-year old guy, from what I can see at people younger than me they spend almost all their web-related time on Facebook properties: Instagram, WhatsApp groups, Facebook private groups (FB the main app is also dying), with TikTok coming strong from behind. All of these are places where Google Search doesn’t have any reach. So one could say that the 2011 mantra “all arrows behind the same big arrow” (or whatever it was) was quite correct, Google+ was Google the company’s major chance of still remaining relevant in 10 or 15 years’ time. They still have YT, too bad they don’t know how to manage it.

jwond 7y ago
You might like DuckDuckGo and “bangs”. https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang
- choathedolls 7y ago
  For anyone reading this thinking "what a killer feature I need to switch to DDG now". All browsers do this natively now. In Chromium engines it's found under "Manage Search Engine". In Firefox it's under "One Click Search Engine".
  - andolanra 7y ago
    My Firefox install has seven search engines by default in the "one-click search engine" options. By contrast, DuckDuckGo has 13000 bang shortcuts. Sure, you don't need all of them, but I use dozens: some of them almost daily (like !w for Wikipedia and !wt for Wiktionary), some sporadically (like !tw for Twitter or !a for Amazon) and some of them only rarely (e.g. I picked up a Pokémon game recently and consequently have used !bulba to quickly search Bulbapedia, a Pokémon fan wiki.) Of course I can add all those to Firefox, but DuckDuckGo already has them set up, and has many more that I can use without thinking about them. I think that still counts as a killer feature.

randomsearch 7y ago

Google’s biggest opportunity is Cloud. They’re playing catch up but with the culture and staff they have, that’s where I’d be focussing my efforts. I think the 2020s will be the biggest decade for cloud adoption.

GeorgeWBasic 7y ago
I don't think it is. Their hard-earned reputation for canceling services is really hurting them now. They never accounted for the effect of all the users they've been continually pissing off moving up in the ranks in companies and deciding never to use Google services. The leaked communication that suggests that they could actually cancel GCP doomed any chance that that would be a big player next to AWS and Azure.
- seppin 7y ago
  > I don't think it is. Their hard-earned reputation for canceling services is really hurting them now I've only ever heard people complain about this on here, nowhere else.
  - GeorgeWBasic 7y ago
    They don't typically complain, but when asked, it's common knowledge among all the programmers at work and all the ones I know. Google can't be counted on. Furthermore, it's tech types who make the decision to use GCP or not, not average Joes who use their other services, so you'd want to look more at places like this for the prevailing opinions.
    - ddalex 7y ago
      > it's tech types who make the decision to use GCP or not Perhaps at startups. At big companies, the call is made by directors and VPs that are well fined by sales people - and that's where the real money is.
      - 7y ago

jboy55 7y ago

They're just turning the big dial that squeezes more money out of every user. They resisted for so long, but now they can't grow YoY without turning it. It's a one-way dial too, you can never turn it back. Yahoo did this, most easily seen back on Yahoo Messenger, where I believe they fit an ad in 6 point type between two elements. I've seen it at plenty of places that does revenue based A/B testing. You do an A/B test, measuring $ vs User retention. Money goes up, and retention maybe is affected, but over a few weeks, it looks like its the same. So you go on to the next test. Eventually, you find you have to do drastic measures to stop bleeding money. I wish I could say how long you need to measure retention for, but its probably too long for the test to make sense.

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
We've reached Peak Google. It's time for newcomers to reinvent video, reinvent search, reinvent email and start all over again.

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago

Based off these dark patterns, the penny pinching at Google is real. A company that is penny pinching -- both by spending less on employees, and nickeling/diming customers -- is a sure sign they're struggling to grow. When you to get to be Google's size, how do you continue the growth trajectory of your past? It gets harder and harder to do so. Their offers to engineers are less competitive, YouTube serves tons of ads, and Chrome is going to ban uBlock It's obvious where Google is at: strict monetization. They don't see any further growth, or they wouldn't be degrading their services.

buboard 7y ago

you know why they re dying? because i have to add "reddit" or "stackoverflow" or "wiki" to my questions because google often gives shit results, and the mix of ads and results is hilariously confusing. If reddit and SO wake up and realize how well they can monetize their own search, google is gonna be panicking.

a_imho 7y ago

They are not dying, but the perception has been long changing from one of tech dearest to be critical by default of Google.

AJ007 7y ago

I searched the comments for FTC and yours was the only that popped up. For the record, I don’t think this is FTC compliant. It also reeks of the kind of this that regulators would adjust their laws for. Google is playing with a situation where regulators may write very explicit rules that say exactly how much labeling their ads need. A 50%-75% chop in outgoing paid clicks would be material to their earnings. They’ve been in a situation for a decade where a large chunk of their most valuable demographic had no idea they’ve been clicking on ads. That isn’t a metric they should be getting more greedy on. Regulators could just set up a test where, if a large enough percent of users don’t know they’ve clicked on an ad, paid disclosure has to be more explicit. The low hanging revenue fruit for Google at this point is very sparse. Financially incentivized executives are scrambling to do questionable things to hit bonuses that probably shouldn’t be attainable. Kind of like Boeing.