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Yes this is the most insane thing about GOOG to me. Yes, search is basically monopoly moat of recurring growing revenue. On the other hand, they've spent not

Yes this is the most insane thing about GOOG to me. Yes, search is basically monopoly moat of recurring growing revenue. On the other hand, they've spent not a decade, but about 25 years betting this would remain the case! I've met a lot of people who work at GOOG, and yet none of them could explain to me how the thing they work on makes any money for GOOG. In fact, most went out of their way to volunteer to me that they only work on R&D/moonshot/non-revenue generating activities.. proudly. Quite a large subset of them showed almost an embarrassment of the single revenue stream (tricking old people to click on Pharma ads instead of genuine search results), and actively distanced themselves from it as some sort of moral shield. It is amazing to have that many smart people working for that long and not bother to find some other ways to make money. Just complete lack of focus.

rapsey 4y ago
I guess they were counting on one of the moonshots to work out.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
eastbound 4y ago
It’s not the people, it’s the management that decided which traits they would reward, both at hiring and during the career.
- sithlord 4y ago
  at least in the tech side of things, they decided to hire the same type of person, uncreatives who memorize leetcode questions and have no ability to think outside of that box. memorize leetcode, regurgitate memorize system design, regurgitate. There are no room for creatives with that process.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  Thankfully when I was graduating they had some strict school & GPA filters that someone as lowly as me wasn't even dignified a response. Wall Street tech DGAF about that though.
  - neilv 4y ago
    It seemed like Google's hiring filters were about what a Stanford student might think is important (that socioeconomic class, had learned what Stanford students do, thinks whatever they don't know is less important or follows naturally from what they know, preferably recent grad (again, student thinking), with affluent lifestyle expectations, etc.). Wall Street, OTOH, is about making money. They might also not fully know how to hire the people they want, but it seemed they valued scrappy more, especially when it leads to real results (which are maybe easier for them to see, when it can be pretty directly quantified in dollars). (Though the Wall Street recruiter I talked with, back 2 decades ago, when I first wanted to work for Google, did ask about my GPA. So I told them I had a perfect GPA, like most of the other students in that grad program, and that that wouldn't tell them much about someone's potential. Then I told them I didn't really want to work on Wall Street, which had a bad reputation from the preceding decade, though the $400K to start was maybe 10x what I was making at the time. Then Google gave me some asinine brogrammer student nonsense in the interview, before that was a thing, and before wannabe companies mimicked it. So I ended up going to neither company.)
    - steveBK123 4y ago
      I graduated between dotbomb & GFC, so my dad was convinced programmers would never have jobs again. Further, Silicon Valley was not exactly top of the list for me given the preceding crash. Finally, if you wanted to stay on east coast in late 90s/early 00s in tech, there wasn't a lot of choice outside Wall St.
  - nradov 4y ago
    And yet there are fairly high-level Google employees who came in with acquisitions and don't even have college degrees.
ForHackernews 4y ago
Maybe really genuinely smart people want to work on something that matters more than just making money. I think there's a reason the average physicist is much brighter than your average Google software engineer, but gets paid about a fifth as much.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  its smart to be downwardly mobile!
  - ForHackernews 4y ago
    I have more respect for the Wall Streeters: at least they're honest and don't go around pretending they're saving the world with their latest compiles-to-Javascript.
    - steveBK123 4y ago
      Most people, if they were honest, would admit they work to make money to have a life. SV has a strong tilt towards pretending whatever BS get rich quick scheme of ad / VC supported is saving the world. It's weird watching it from the outside and imagine the other path not taken. In 20 years we may look back at social media, smartphones, the whole PII data based economy with its recommendation algo rage loops as our generations Big Tobacco.
AlbertCory 4y ago
> not bother to find some other ways to make money. Oh, they definitely tried, and still try. The problem is the same as many large companies: they want a new trick as lucrative as the old trick, and there aren't any.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  did they try though? it seemed all scattershot, unfocussed, repetitive (how many chat/video apps) and quickly taken out back and shot.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    it's not ALL scattershot. GMail and Docs for enterprises are a pretty sustained effort. Cloud is pretty sustained. YouTube is unkillable. But in general you're right.
    - steveBK123 4y ago
      GSuite is either underpriced or underfeatured. Most real enterprise still happens on Office, and lots of consumers happy give Apple $100/year for iCloud. Cloud services - aren't they basically 3rd behind AMZN/MSFT now, by A LOT? They are basically competing for 3rd against IBM/Oracle/etc, and some quarters they are #4.
      - AlbertCory 4y ago
        No arguments there. They're still trying; just not hard enough.
        steveBK123 4y ago
        I mean, once you are past the free tier.. GSuite is close to the monthly cost of Office365, and Google sheets is not even close to Excel. You can basically program mini applications in Excel vs a basic spreadsheet app for medium sized spreadsheets that multiple people can edit in their browser with version tracking.
jbverschoor 4y ago
ChatGPT would probably be a better search engine than google. ChatGPT and Reddit cover most of your info. What remains is shopping, but Amazon and even Instagram are better at that. Lastly, Google has no audience for creating awareness like fb / ig / tt
- steveBK123 4y ago
  Well I'd say they both put all their eggs in one basket & let that basket deteriorate. Show of hands - people who feel google search has improved in the last 5/10 years vs people who feel it's gotten demonstrably worse? So they have a monopoly product that is something like a 2 sided market (advertisers & search users) where both sides hate using it..
  - fragmede 4y ago
    It autosuggests and I don't even have to click on links half the time anymore. I'd call that progress. Not ground shaking like ChatGPT but half the time I get the (right) answer to my question just by typing some related words into the search bar. I don't know how many Google searches I did yesterday, but it feels like a lot. It does has problems with certain queries beyond a certain depth, which I also get frustrated with, but I can go from having forgotten calculus to integrating by parts with the help of Google.
    - ipaddr 4y ago
      The auto suggesting where they filter prompts to only safe terms You literally can't go to page 2 anymore It ignores what you ask and answers what it think/wants you see. Previously you controlled search now you are lucky if a site is even in the index.
  - hdhejenennd 4y ago
    >Show of hands - people who feel google search has improved in the last 5/10 years vs people who feel it's gotten demonstrably worse? I mean, personally I think this is very likely true. My feeling is that it's the web itself which has gotten demonstrably worse. Diagnosing the reasons for that is a more interesting problem.
fragmede 4y ago
The non-ad moat that I see them losing is if slack gets into the office app game. so instead of editing a Google doc and sending the link in slack, you just edit it inside slack.
- lumost 4y ago
  Salesforce owns quip a pretty reasonable office competitor. This should only be a matter of time.
granshaw 4y ago
Actually at the start the founders didn’t think search would be continue to be as dominant as it has been (will have to find the source and update…)
- dekhn 4y ago
  That's right- Larry wanted a question-answering machine. Larry and Sergey "got bored of search" (I heard this from the engs who were going to weekly presentations to show new search features) when they felt it was just chasing a larger index and showing people what they wanted to click on.
  - nonesuchluck 4y ago
    That would certainly be an improvement over their current strat (ignoring what I want to click on, showing me what's most profitable for them instead)
  - mostlysimilar 4y ago
    Meanwhile I long for the days where this was Google's focus. I want a better index of the web and I want the search engine to give me the tools to filter out the garbage I don't want. The fact that this isn't a feature tells you everything you need to know about Google's real priority: it's not us, it's the advertisers.
    - graycat 4y ago
      > I want the search engine to give me the tools to filter out the garbage I don't want. Thought some people might want that. Have the user interface and pure/applied math worked out and documented and code designed, written, and running.
mathteddybear 4y ago
If the "Google other" revenue is $25 billions, how many unicorns is that? As for what googlers told you, keep in mind that they are pretty loyal - they have that Lamda chatbot as if an employee perk, and only one of them leaked a sample.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  $25B is 1/2 the revenue of Apple "wearables and accessories or 1/3 the revenue of Apple "services". $25B is also less than what Amazon now makes on ads, which should especially given Google pause. Consider that Amazon started as simply an online retailer and has successfully spun up other business lines that now account for 50% of revenue across online fulfillment / 3rd party services, physical stores, subscription services, ads, cloud, etc. 4 of these are bigger than "google other". Sure, big absolute number, but trivial as a percent of a FAANG scale company revenue. Apple & Amazon have no one product category making up more than 50% of revenue. Meaning they can take some serious pain on any product category and it not be fatal. This also means that they have staff distributed across a wide variety of product lines. Google has 7x the staff they did in 2009. This seems like a precarious position to be in during this part of the cycle. I can imagine them coming under serious scrutiny to allocate resources appropriately if say, only 20% of staff are responsible for 90% of revenue. If you can't grow the top line, you can certainly grow the bottom line..
  - leoqa 4y ago
    Technically I think you would shrink the bottom line, since profit is (top) revenue - (bottom) expenses.
  - pythonaut_16 4y ago
    I don't disagree, but I don't think it's fair to lump AWS in with the rest of Amazon's side projects. If we're comparing Amazon and Google you almost have to compare AWS to Google search since AWS is driving a huge part of their profits.
csomar 4y ago
I don’t know but Google is very bad at releasing and maintaining products they already have a horrible reputation. They could have done better but I guess no one gives a flying f when the money is still coming. Google did more than search: gmail, youtube, docs, cloud and that’s just stuff on top of my mind.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  YouTube makes money.. because ads. Cloud they have somehow managed to slip so badly as to be competing for 3rd against IBM & Oracle. Docs/gmail is rounding error because its feature poor and not monetized well.
  - EricE 4y ago
    >"YouTube makes money.. because ads." Does it? The last I saw about Youtube and profit referred to it as revenue neutral.
Nifty3929 4y ago
Why should they find another way to make money? Think about it from the shareholder's perspective: As an investor, I chose to put my money into an ad distribution company. I know this business has a finite end, and I'm okay with that. I'm gambling that I'll get more money between now and when they close up to give me a good enough return. If I want to invest in an X or Y, then I will do that. In fact I am well diversified into hundreds of other companies anyway. But I don't want my ad distribution investment clouded or diluted with cars, AI, balloons, or anything else. Let a business be good at one thing (possibly closely adjacent things), and live as long as that's a valuable contribution to society, then close the doors. It's the execs that want to diversify into other areas, because this is what keeps them in the game longer. If the business they are currently running winds down, that may not be good for them.
steveBK123 4y ago
Update, lol: * DOJ to sue GOOG over Digital Ad Dominance

rapsey 4y ago

I guess they were counting on one of the moonshots to work out.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

eastbound 4y ago

It’s not the people, it’s the management that decided which traits they would reward, both at hiring and during the career.

sithlord 4y ago
at least in the tech side of things, they decided to hire the same type of person, uncreatives who memorize leetcode questions and have no ability to think outside of that box. memorize leetcode, regurgitate memorize system design, regurgitate. There are no room for creatives with that process.
steveBK123 4y ago
Thankfully when I was graduating they had some strict school & GPA filters that someone as lowly as me wasn't even dignified a response. Wall Street tech DGAF about that though.
- neilv 4y ago
  It seemed like Google's hiring filters were about what a Stanford student might think is important (that socioeconomic class, had learned what Stanford students do, thinks whatever they don't know is less important or follows naturally from what they know, preferably recent grad (again, student thinking), with affluent lifestyle expectations, etc.). Wall Street, OTOH, is about making money. They might also not fully know how to hire the people they want, but it seemed they valued scrappy more, especially when it leads to real results (which are maybe easier for them to see, when it can be pretty directly quantified in dollars). (Though the Wall Street recruiter I talked with, back 2 decades ago, when I first wanted to work for Google, did ask about my GPA. So I told them I had a perfect GPA, like most of the other students in that grad program, and that that wouldn't tell them much about someone's potential. Then I told them I didn't really want to work on Wall Street, which had a bad reputation from the preceding decade, though the $400K to start was maybe 10x what I was making at the time. Then Google gave me some asinine brogrammer student nonsense in the interview, before that was a thing, and before wannabe companies mimicked it. So I ended up going to neither company.)
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    I graduated between dotbomb & GFC, so my dad was convinced programmers would never have jobs again. Further, Silicon Valley was not exactly top of the list for me given the preceding crash. Finally, if you wanted to stay on east coast in late 90s/early 00s in tech, there wasn't a lot of choice outside Wall St.
- nradov 4y ago
  And yet there are fairly high-level Google employees who came in with acquisitions and don't even have college degrees.

ForHackernews 4y ago

Maybe really genuinely smart people want to work on something that matters more than just making money. I think there's a reason the average physicist is much brighter than your average Google software engineer, but gets paid about a fifth as much.

steveBK123 4y ago
its smart to be downwardly mobile!
- ForHackernews 4y ago
  I have more respect for the Wall Streeters: at least they're honest and don't go around pretending they're saving the world with their latest compiles-to-Javascript.
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    Most people, if they were honest, would admit they work to make money to have a life. SV has a strong tilt towards pretending whatever BS get rich quick scheme of ad / VC supported is saving the world. It's weird watching it from the outside and imagine the other path not taken. In 20 years we may look back at social media, smartphones, the whole PII data based economy with its recommendation algo rage loops as our generations Big Tobacco.

AlbertCory 4y ago

> not bother to find some other ways to make money. Oh, they definitely tried, and still try. The problem is the same as many large companies: they want a new trick as lucrative as the old trick, and there aren't any.

steveBK123 4y ago
did they try though? it seemed all scattershot, unfocussed, repetitive (how many chat/video apps) and quickly taken out back and shot.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  it's not ALL scattershot. GMail and Docs for enterprises are a pretty sustained effort. Cloud is pretty sustained. YouTube is unkillable. But in general you're right.
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    GSuite is either underpriced or underfeatured. Most real enterprise still happens on Office, and lots of consumers happy give Apple $100/year for iCloud. Cloud services - aren't they basically 3rd behind AMZN/MSFT now, by A LOT? They are basically competing for 3rd against IBM/Oracle/etc, and some quarters they are #4.
    - AlbertCory 4y ago
      No arguments there. They're still trying; just not hard enough.
      - steveBK123 4y ago
        I mean, once you are past the free tier.. GSuite is close to the monthly cost of Office365, and Google sheets is not even close to Excel. You can basically program mini applications in Excel vs a basic spreadsheet app for medium sized spreadsheets that multiple people can edit in their browser with version tracking.

jbverschoor 4y ago

ChatGPT would probably be a better search engine than google. ChatGPT and Reddit cover most of your info. What remains is shopping, but Amazon and even Instagram are better at that. Lastly, Google has no audience for creating awareness like fb / ig / tt

steveBK123 4y ago
Well I'd say they both put all their eggs in one basket & let that basket deteriorate. Show of hands - people who feel google search has improved in the last 5/10 years vs people who feel it's gotten demonstrably worse? So they have a monopoly product that is something like a 2 sided market (advertisers & search users) where both sides hate using it..
- fragmede 4y ago
  It autosuggests and I don't even have to click on links half the time anymore. I'd call that progress. Not ground shaking like ChatGPT but half the time I get the (right) answer to my question just by typing some related words into the search bar. I don't know how many Google searches I did yesterday, but it feels like a lot. It does has problems with certain queries beyond a certain depth, which I also get frustrated with, but I can go from having forgotten calculus to integrating by parts with the help of Google.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    The auto suggesting where they filter prompts to only safe terms You literally can't go to page 2 anymore It ignores what you ask and answers what it think/wants you see. Previously you controlled search now you are lucky if a site is even in the index.
- hdhejenennd 4y ago
  >Show of hands - people who feel google search has improved in the last 5/10 years vs people who feel it's gotten demonstrably worse? I mean, personally I think this is very likely true. My feeling is that it's the web itself which has gotten demonstrably worse. Diagnosing the reasons for that is a more interesting problem.

fragmede 4y ago

The non-ad moat that I see them losing is if slack gets into the office app game. so instead of editing a Google doc and sending the link in slack, you just edit it inside slack.

lumost 4y ago
Salesforce owns quip a pretty reasonable office competitor. This should only be a matter of time.

granshaw 4y ago

Actually at the start the founders didn’t think search would be continue to be as dominant as it has been (will have to find the source and update…)

dekhn 4y ago
That's right- Larry wanted a question-answering machine. Larry and Sergey "got bored of search" (I heard this from the engs who were going to weekly presentations to show new search features) when they felt it was just chasing a larger index and showing people what they wanted to click on.
- nonesuchluck 4y ago
  That would certainly be an improvement over their current strat (ignoring what I want to click on, showing me what's most profitable for them instead)
- mostlysimilar 4y ago
  Meanwhile I long for the days where this was Google's focus. I want a better index of the web and I want the search engine to give me the tools to filter out the garbage I don't want. The fact that this isn't a feature tells you everything you need to know about Google's real priority: it's not us, it's the advertisers.
  - graycat 4y ago
    > I want the search engine to give me the tools to filter out the garbage I don't want. Thought some people might want that. Have the user interface and pure/applied math worked out and documented and code designed, written, and running.

mathteddybear 4y ago

If the "Google other" revenue is $25 billions, how many unicorns is that? As for what googlers told you, keep in mind that they are pretty loyal - they have that Lamda chatbot as if an employee perk, and only one of them leaked a sample.

steveBK123 4y ago
$25B is 1/2 the revenue of Apple "wearables and accessories or 1/3 the revenue of Apple "services". $25B is also less than what Amazon now makes on ads, which should especially given Google pause. Consider that Amazon started as simply an online retailer and has successfully spun up other business lines that now account for 50% of revenue across online fulfillment / 3rd party services, physical stores, subscription services, ads, cloud, etc. 4 of these are bigger than "google other". Sure, big absolute number, but trivial as a percent of a FAANG scale company revenue. Apple & Amazon have no one product category making up more than 50% of revenue. Meaning they can take some serious pain on any product category and it not be fatal. This also means that they have staff distributed across a wide variety of product lines. Google has 7x the staff they did in 2009. This seems like a precarious position to be in during this part of the cycle. I can imagine them coming under serious scrutiny to allocate resources appropriately if say, only 20% of staff are responsible for 90% of revenue. If you can't grow the top line, you can certainly grow the bottom line..
- leoqa 4y ago
  Technically I think you would shrink the bottom line, since profit is (top) revenue - (bottom) expenses.
- pythonaut_16 4y ago
  I don't disagree, but I don't think it's fair to lump AWS in with the rest of Amazon's side projects. If we're comparing Amazon and Google you almost have to compare AWS to Google search since AWS is driving a huge part of their profits.

csomar 4y ago

I don’t know but Google is very bad at releasing and maintaining products they already have a horrible reputation. They could have done better but I guess no one gives a flying f when the money is still coming. Google did more than search: gmail, youtube, docs, cloud and that’s just stuff on top of my mind.

steveBK123 4y ago
YouTube makes money.. because ads. Cloud they have somehow managed to slip so badly as to be competing for 3rd against IBM & Oracle. Docs/gmail is rounding error because its feature poor and not monetized well.
- EricE 4y ago
  >"YouTube makes money.. because ads." Does it? The last I saw about Youtube and profit referred to it as revenue neutral.

Nifty3929 4y ago

Why should they find another way to make money? Think about it from the shareholder's perspective: As an investor, I chose to put my money into an ad distribution company. I know this business has a finite end, and I'm okay with that. I'm gambling that I'll get more money between now and when they close up to give me a good enough return. If I want to invest in an X or Y, then I will do that. In fact I am well diversified into hundreds of other companies anyway. But I don't want my ad distribution investment clouded or diluted with cars, AI, balloons, or anything else. Let a business be good at one thing (possibly closely adjacent things), and live as long as that's a valuable contribution to society, then close the doors. It's the execs that want to diversify into other areas, because this is what keeps them in the game longer. If the business they are currently running winds down, that may not be good for them.

steveBK123 4y ago

Update, lol: * DOJ to sue GOOG over Digital Ad Dominance