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For context, I'm not at all a fan of Google and try to avoid all of their products as best I can. However your prediction here seems very disconnected from rea

For context, I'm not at all a fan of Google and try to avoid all of their products as best I can. However your prediction here seems very disconnected from reality. Even if antitrust required Google not pay for search engine placement, they control the single largest browser (by far). And even when presented with a free choice on a browser they don't control, many users will continue using Google just out of habit. Most people use Google as a verb to mean "search the web" and these habits are firmly entrenched. The most likely occurrence to disrupt their search market share has got to be AI, and they have a meaningful competitor in the LLM chat bot space along with significant resources to keep up with the others. So it seems like a stretch to even think that a new mode of search will completely obliterate them in a short time frame. Even besides search, they have robust businesses with advertising, media, hardware, software services, and more. Admittedly these are smaller revenue-wise than search ads, but would still be a meaningful business if search somehow was snapped out of existence suddenly.

stOneskull 3y ago
> Most people use Google as a verb to mean "search the web" and these habits are firmly entrenched. within a year or two, which is a long time on the internet, bing could trench deep enough. i think bing chat outperforms google bard at the moment as well.. but who knows what could happen.
ChuckMcM 3y ago
We just see different realities. My tenure at Google was 2006-2010, and they had just decided maybe the mini-kitchens were a bit much. The challenge at Google is that the only business they have that makes money is search advertising. What is worse, the margins on search advertising have been eroding steadily since about 2008[1]. Google kept that from showing up in their results by first cutting down on the amount of money they sent to AdSense, then by increasing the number of ads on "Google properties", and then by constructing "revenue zones" around search that is considered "commercial" ("Where to buy <x>" is a commercial search, "What is the speed of light" is not). The result has been the "hollowing out" of their product. When I joined Blekko in 2010 (acquired by IBM in 2015) the concept of a "spam free" search engine was new. It was a hit, especially with people who used search for their jobs, but there is a minimum level of traffic you need if you are going to support it with ads. We ran two versions of the service, the "labeled" version which had your standard web API and the "white label" version for folks who wanted search results but they wanted to monetize them differently. There are lots of things you can do there. For example you can put an Amazon affiliate ID for every result that meets the query but points to Amazon, you can boost a page in the results that is a link to another page in your inventory that has more profitable ads on it, you can absorb all of Wikipedia and show its pages with your own ads on them. We had people try all of these schemes and more. A number of things we thought of as "sketchy" like returning a first page of links that was nothing but ads "above the fold"[2] is something Google is now regularly doing. The Google "product" that makes money has turned to crap. That makes them ripe for disruption but they do, as you note, have a ton of money on hand. They have tried unsuccessfully for the nearly 15 years since I left to come up with another product that makes money. Youtube is the closest bet, and they have done all sorts of crap to make it profitable (like literally putting ads on people's videos and taking the money for themselves) and yet it struggles to make a profit (I'm not sure if it has ever had a full year where it made more than it cost to run it). So I see them as dying slowly have eroding margins while they fight against their own cultural biases in defining what is a "hit" and what should get canned. As a former insider (and knowing people who still work there) and looking at the problems that got them here that are not addressed, I am not confident they will be able to pull out of the dive. Its been over a decade and their descent rate hasn't changed AFAICT. Yes, it is a different reality than the one you see. And I'm okay with it if it turns out my reasoning was flawed in someway and they pull out of the slump and go on to regain some former greatness. That will be a win because I will learning something from it. But as a guy who has spent a lot time in the operations role, of the future probabilities going forward for them, I think the most probable is an acquisition by Apple. [1] 2008 was the year the Mortgage crisis hit but it was also the last point at which a step change in search quality was achievable due to algorithm and not just putting more machines on the problem. So from that point on, competing with Google "Search Quality" was a money problem not a technical problem. [2] Web parlance that the "fold" is the second screen, so anything you can see in the browser window with scrolling down is above the "fold" (old newspaper term).

stOneskull 3y ago

> Most people use Google as a verb to mean "search the web" and these habits are firmly entrenched. within a year or two, which is a long time on the internet, bing could trench deep enough. i think bing chat outperforms google bard at the moment as well.. but who knows what could happen.

ChuckMcM 3y ago

We just see different realities. My tenure at Google was 2006-2010, and they had just decided maybe the mini-kitchens were a bit much. The challenge at Google is that the only business they have that makes money is search advertising. What is worse, the margins on search advertising have been eroding steadily since about 2008[1]. Google kept that from showing up in their results by first cutting down on the amount of money they sent to AdSense, then by increasing the number of ads on "Google properties", and then by constructing "revenue zones" around search that is considered "commercial" ("Where to buy <x>" is a commercial search, "What is the speed of light" is not). The result has been the "hollowing out" of their product. When I joined Blekko in 2010 (acquired by IBM in 2015) the concept of a "spam free" search engine was new. It was a hit, especially with people who used search for their jobs, but there is a minimum level of traffic you need if you are going to support it with ads. We ran two versions of the service, the "labeled" version which had your standard web API and the "white label" version for folks who wanted search results but they wanted to monetize them differently. There are lots of things you can do there. For example you can put an Amazon affiliate ID for every result that meets the query but points to Amazon, you can boost a page in the results that is a link to another page in your inventory that has more profitable ads on it, you can absorb all of Wikipedia and show its pages with your own ads on them. We had people try all of these schemes and more. A number of things we thought of as "sketchy" like returning a first page of links that was nothing but ads "above the fold"[2] is something Google is now regularly doing. The Google "product" that makes money has turned to crap. That makes them ripe for disruption but they do, as you note, have a ton of money on hand. They have tried unsuccessfully for the nearly 15 years since I left to come up with another product that makes money. Youtube is the closest bet, and they have done all sorts of crap to make it profitable (like literally putting ads on people's videos and taking the money for themselves) and yet it struggles to make a profit (I'm not sure if it has ever had a full year where it made more than it cost to run it). So I see them as dying slowly have eroding margins while they fight against their own cultural biases in defining what is a "hit" and what should get canned. As a former insider (and knowing people who still work there) and looking at the problems that got them here that are not addressed, I am not confident they will be able to pull out of the dive. Its been over a decade and their descent rate hasn't changed AFAICT. Yes, it is a different reality than the one you see. And I'm okay with it if it turns out my reasoning was flawed in someway and they pull out of the slump and go on to regain some former greatness. That will be a win because I will learning something from it. But as a guy who has spent a lot time in the operations role, of the future probabilities going forward for them, I think the most probable is an acquisition by Apple. [1] 2008 was the year the Mortgage crisis hit but it was also the last point at which a step change in search quality was achievable due to algorithm and not just putting more machines on the problem. So from that point on, competing with Google "Search Quality" was a money problem not a technical problem. [2] Web parlance that the "fold" is the second screen, so anything you can see in the browser window with scrolling down is above the "fold" (old newspaper term).