15 ms·
I thought that this earnings announcement would be the first one where we'd see some impact from competitive knowledge engines, e.g. Perplexity, You.com, ChatGP
by dmckinno 2y ago
I thought that this earnings announcement would be the first one where we'd see some impact from competitive knowledge engines, e.g. Perplexity, You.com, ChatGPT + Bing, etc., but Google still grew search $6B/15%.
This is impressive both because it's hard to keep such a big business growing at that rate and because essentially everyone in my social circle has moved on from going to Google first for information. I guess our demographic is not predictive of the larger market.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- foogazi 2y ago> everyone in my social circle has moved on from going to Google first for information Or have they ?
- Workaccount2 2y agoI'll admit that despite having a GPT4 sub which I use often, I still fallback on google for quick questions and verification of what GPT4 says if I need to be certain. Not even because I am particularly going to google, it's just so heavily integrated.
- londons_explore 2y agoI find GPT4 requires long queries to get much out. And I can't be bothered typing out a long query if Google can give me the same in 3 words and scanning down the result page.
- asadm 2y agoyou will like perplexity pro then?
- ethbr1 2y agoOr Kagi, which is essentially LLM + citation links (with the '?' suffix)
- laweijfmvo 2y agoI have moved to Kagi as my search engine, although 99.99..% of people will probably never pay for search. Anecdotally, whenever I'm not finding what I need on Kagi and fallback to Google (less than once per week), it's shocking what a disaster the UX of Google's products have become (Maps is an even bigger offender than Search, where seemingly arbitrarily labeled places get more visibility than the search results).
- EL_Loco 2y agoWhat do you use instead of Google Maps? I don't know enough about alternatives to choose one.
- harryp_peng 2y agoWhat's even the google hate? the company is great and provides value. Why go into the rabbit hole of worse products?
- nilamo 2y agoReread GP, Google maps has gotten atrocious with highlighting random spots above your search. That's not hate, it's observable fact.
- pb7 2y agoFirst time on HN? Welcome.
- EL_Loco 2y agoI don't hate on Google, but the user highlighted some feature on Google Maps that are not desirable, and clearly knows more about map apps than me, so why not ask him what he uses? Google provides great value, I agree, but sometimes there's better stuff out there.
- jbverschoor 2y agoApple Maps has better satellite images, and since about a year is often better at navigating. Google maps trumps with pois
- duringmath 2y agoYou still have to verify plausible sounding LLM output somewhere.
- utensil4778 2y agoAnd Google is doing a worse and worse job of performing that role or any other. There are other search engines and almost all of them are orders of magnitude better than google is now.
- duringmath 2y agoCitations needed there buddy
- utensil4778 2y agoNo, not really. The decline of Google's search performance is on the front page of HN at least once a week. It's common knowledge at this point. Try Kagi if you want to be reminded of what good search is like.
- NtochkaNzvanova 2y agoOn what metrics of search quality is Kagi "orders of magnitude" better than Google?
- Jensson 2y agoIt is probably massively better for niche technical searches which many technical people here do for their job, that is the Kagis userbase after all. But such searches doesn't generate much ad revenue, so it doesn't do much to Google to lose them, all the people searching for articles about makeup or clothes or games or other things that has strong advertisement potential Google is awesome as a search engine, I haven't seen anyone say Kagi is better there. Kagi is only better for the searches that Google doesn't care about since they generate so little ad revue, Google uses so much compute per search that I'm not even sure such technical searches would be profitable for them to run, likely that would increase profits to lose them to Kagi.
- tech_buddha 2y agoThe layoffs and dividend are related -- the company's death rattle has been shaking a while now. Management is desperate to retain the confidence of the investor class.
- alphabetting 2y ago> death rattle Stock up 16% after hours.
- kernal 2y agoIt is a death rattle. For the short sellers, that is.
- StressedDev 2y agoI think most companies would love to being "dying" like Google "is". Seriously, Google is not dying and making obviously false claims is not helpful.
- tech_buddha 2y agoSpeaking as a shareholder here, a 2 trillion dollar valuation warrants extraordinary justification. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. As the AI models get better and better at compressing the world's information, people will be going directly to their model of choice
- nl 2y ago> a 2 trillion dollar valuation warrants extraordinary justification $320B annual revenue, 15% growth, $0.20 per share dividend and $70B share buyback. Enough said.
- zztop44 2y agoAnd it’s very likely that for 90% of people their model of choice will be at the other end of the Google/Chrome search box
- 2y ago
- abadpoli 2y agoSeems like a situation where it’s worth it to be cognizant of your bubble. I don’t know exactly what you meant by “our demographic”, but I’m a frequent reader of HN, work in tech, and generally stay up to date with all things tech, and yet… I don’t know if a single person that doesn’t still use Google as their go-to place for information. Before this comment I had never even heard of Perplexity or You.com. /shrug
- marcosdumay 2y agoOh, Perplexity is great. It's an LLM that answers with links and explanations of what you'll find in them. I don't find it useful as a main search engine, but some queries are obviously better handled by something like it. Anyway, yeah, I guess I'm the only person I know in real life that does not use Google.
- darkwizard42 2y agoI think this is the same thing I feel when I read Meta's earnings. I continue to see growth in usage of their core properties but I don't think my entire circle touches Facebook or even Instagram nearly as much. Whatsapp certainly isn't driving those ad dollars so it truly is remarkable how disconnected my demographic (loosely using my here) is from the overall world usage.
- carlossouza 2y agoThe world is much larger than the bubble we live in.
- spydum 2y agoOr they are counting bots and other ai agents and ignoring the truth?
- sahila 2y agoUltimately advertisers want a return on their spend and it's a closely watched metric for marketers. Them continuing to spend is indicative that there's growing value in ads, ie bots/ai agents cannot be the reason for their growth. You could argue fb and particularly twitter are incentivized to include it in their DAU counts but market cares more for revenue for large companies.
- endisneigh 2y agoThis site has always been a bubble.
- okdood64 2y agoAgreed. Reddit is a bubble too if you take note of the viewpoints there, but that reaches a wider variety of folks. Imagine how much of a bubble HN is.
- Jensson 2y agoHN is a bubble where people listen to what you say even if you argue against them, I haven't found any such place anywhere else before. I've found some people who listen even to people they disagree with on some niche forums, but never a community as big as this with density this high. Other than listening and arguing in relatively good faith I don't think HN is a bubble, although such people probably have pretty different opinions than the typical person simply because they listen and change themselves more so it gets more refined.
- smgit 2y agoBut isn't that the definition of a bubble - a group that doesn't behave the same as gen pop?
- grobgambit 2y agoI would say this is the definition of a sub culture. A bubble in this context has the connotation of ignorance of what is outside the bubble.
- rvz 2y agoIndeed. Most of the commenters here really have no clue of what is going on and are just reacting to the headlines. I'm very delighted that I bought GOOGL stock at $95 when it fell after everyone panicked at their Bard demo a year ago. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34713073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34713073
- baron816 2y agoI think that most of the traffic being stolen away is going to be for low value searches. I (and probably almost everyone else) use Google when I already know what I want, ie I’m trying to get to a company’s website to buy a particular thing, but don’t know their url name. I’m not going to use an LLM to shop for car insurance or look for hotels.
- falcor84 2y ago>I’m not going to use an LLM to shop for car insurance or look for hotels. As I understand it, this is a great use-case for AI agents (a-la Custom GPT) and I wouldn't be surprised if the tech for that matures over the next year.
- linkjuice4all 2y agoI guess I could imagine how they might be helpful in initial research - but no way I'm letting some LLM book a hotel that might not exist or get me car insurance from StratesFrarm Unsurance.
- Jensson 2y ago> but no way I'm letting some LLM book a hotel that might not exist or get me car insurance from StratesFrarm Unsurance. Ah, scammers targeting your LLM assistant will certainly be a thing, this really sounds like the old "I bought the Eiffel tower" scams.
- falcor84 2y agoI'm not clear how this is different from scammers targeting humans? If anything, I'd expect it to be easier to set up the LLM agent to have secure/cryptographical validation of the providers, to prevent against the sorts of traps that humans fall into. In the simplest case, we could just have trusted authorities provide lists of verified booking partners, same as e.g. Google Flights does now.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- chatmasta 2y agoGoogle Search is a product embedded in the lives of everyone on the planet. I wonder to what extent its growth is a reflection of increasing population and Internet penetration. Even if "competitive knowledge engines" impacted Google Search, the effect would likely be minuscule compared to existing growth trajectories. Speaking personally, there are some queries where I prefer an LLM. But usually I start with Google, and it's only after 5-10 searches that I get frustrated enough to remember I could just ask ChatGPT instead. So ironically, I actually send more searches to Google than I would have if they gave me the answer on the first one. I wonder what their search metrics would look like if they removed quick bursts of searches. Presumably, someone searching five times in a row is actually having a bad experience, rather than loving the product so much they came back to it five times in one minute.
- aworks 2y agoEveryone on the planet? Even in China or Russia?
- harryp_peng 2y agoGoogle is just good. You use it to get human answer to a question and find relevant information on a topic. Those are of human nature.
- wyclif 2y agoGoogle used to be good. Now the result you want is sometimes on the third or fourth page. They've cannibalized it.
- vineyardmike 2y ago> its growth is a reflection of increasing population and Internet penetration Considering the explicit link their growth opportunity to internet penetration (as does Facebook), I would say its a very strong reflection.
- NtochkaNzvanova 2y ago> essentially everyone in my social circle has moved on from going to Google first for information. I guess our demographic is not predictive of the larger market. "Google is dead, no one goes there anymore" is one of the most tired takes I see frequently on HN. It's nice to hear someone express the self-awareness to realize that what they see in their immediate circle is not representative of reality.
- kernal 2y agoThey think if they say it enough times they’ll eventually get it right one day to have their I told you so moment. The smart money is always going against their hate. It’s not enough to stop using their services, but to also convince their friends and family to switch to their choices.
- jeffbee 2y agoIf you have a social circle where 100% of your contacts turn to an LLM first, not only have you buried yourself deep in a niche filter bubble, but you have also surrounded yourself with some of the planet's most misinformed people. If I were you, I'd be worried.
- jasonvorhe 2y agoI don't think there's a measurable difference between his social circle and those who still rely on traditional media (news, TV, mainstream "journalism") to form their view of the world. It's just another cage.
- harmmonica 2y agoWhen you say moved on can you share what you're using when you want/need to buy something online? Understand you moving on for information, but just curious what you're using these days for a specific product.
- eitland 2y agoI went to Kagi. Only better quality alternative I found that has the same coverage and is available here. FWIW for my purposes Marginalia is also a lot better quality (less annoying, more likely to give me the results I want - if it has them) than Google now but I cannot use it as my only search engine since the index is still small. The other big ones (Bing, DDG) managed to still be worse than Google last time I tried despite Google goong out of their way to make it easy for others to walk past them. There was another interesting one but they discriminated against non Americans and didn't even allow is to try so I don't know. It looked promising though, but as long as kagi don't betray us I get I stay with it.
- ethbr1 2y ago> when you want/need to buy something online Not OP, but Kagi/reddit/trustedReviewSites/anywhereButAmazon.
- dmckinno 2y agoI'm not a huge online shopper, but if the item isn't a total commodity that I just buy from Amazon without thinking, I generally ask Perplexity for suggestions and find the summaries/conclusions more helpful than clicking through a bunch of links delivered by Google.
- cloudking 2y agoI think I am opted into an experiment, but when I use Google search the first results are answers from their own LLM. https://search.google/ https://search.google/
- sharadov 2y agoI was asking GPT some question reg a Postgres feature , it gave me the answer with the caveat that it's knowledgebase hadn't been updated in a year. I went right back to google.
- animanoir 2y agolol at people still using Google. Kagi is far superior.
- harryp_peng 2y agoConsider this: You ask a question (go to google) to solve a problem. But an LLM solve it for you. That's why they are popular in programming. However, besides this, google is still my go to for relevant information on entertainment and news etc.
- animanoir 2y agoYeah, Kagi is more for academics and people wanting to search the real internet, not the pop one.
- salesynerd 2y agoRecently, I read on another HN thread that Kagi uses Google to build its index. If that's the case, the only way Kagi appears better than Google is that it doesn't show ads. Not sure, if my understanding is correct or not.
- Moldoteck 2y agokagi allows you to downrank or even ban or boost certain websites so that when you serach, if there is a result from that website, it'll be downranked or boosted based on what you set up. It also automatically downranks websites that use shady ad trackers. They are slowly building their 'crawler' too but it's more nuanced regarding how they do this
- kernal 2y ago
- csxv68 2y agoOr there is large scale number fudging and fraud. Just remember no one is auditing what views, likes and clicks count Google and Facebook tell you, you are getting. Advertisers just milk corporations. They dont care if the numbers are fake. They are now trained to tell everyone to spend more or you dont get attention someone else will. As Goldharber once famously said , about the Attention Economy - people have limited attention to give anything but infinite capacity to receive attention. No one likes to hear or believe they dont really have any influence when the system is signalling they do. So the ponzi scheme grows larger and larger. There is a great book about it (from an ex-googler) called the Subprime Attention Crisis. No one knows what to do about it so everyones head is buried deep in the sand. We need new attention allocation systems that are not market driven.
- arebop 2y agoAdvertisers don't always insist on seeing evidence of genuine ROI but online advertising is more measurable than most other forms of ads and when the ROI slips a lot of ads customers notice and act accordingly.
- candiddevmike 2y agoMarketing is fascinating WRT to fraud because everyone benefits from it: the ad space provider, the ad marketplace, and the marketing team who needs to show performance.
- AnotherGoodName 2y agoI personally think this line of thought is due to people just not accepting how profitable advertising is to the end business. We're taking a clear and massive increase in profits that dwarf advertising costs. People don't advertise on meta/Google because they are duped by bots or some conspiracy between ads marketplace and marketing teams to hide the fraud. They advertise because their bottom line goes up and it's clear and direct. I once worked for a company where the only reason we'd ever drop some amount of advertising was due to supply constraints. We sold too much at certain points! It really does work.
- hyuuu 2y agofunny you mentioned that because this demographic is the same demographic that predicted the demise of FB (it has grown in orders of magnitudes), hating on Tesla (also has been growing), didn't believe the viability of Dropbox idea.
- Dalewyn 2y ago>I guess our demographic is not predictive of the larger market. The only thing this demographic is predictive of is its tendency to overestimate its degree of influence. I want to say I'm joking, but I've unfortunately noticed that a lot of techies are very self-absorbed and detached from the wider world at large.
- baxtr 2y agoI played around with the free version of Gemini recently. I gotta say it was quite impressive. On par or even better than the paid version of OpenAI.
- suriya-ganesh 2y agoThis might surprise people a lot. In developing countries Google is synonymous with internet. A lot of even young, people have a mental model of the internet as a subset of Google.
- skybrian 2y agoI’ve read articles about new Internet users in some countries where it’s similar, except Facebook. Maybe it depends on how it was introduced?
- yodsanklai 2y ago> essentially everyone in my social circle has moved on from going to Google first for information As you said, you don't know how representative is your social circle. And you may underestimate your Google usage. ChatGPT often isn't a good substitute to Google. Looking at my history, a lot of my Google queries couldn't be answer by ChatGPT. Either because I need precise information, or recent information. Often I use Google just to redirect me to some specific site, typically wikipedia.
- blobbers 2y agoIt's possible our demographic is just more ahead of the market than you think. There's a lot more quarters left in the future... I already include site:reddit.com when searching for reviews, but I think that's been getting astroturfed away.
- thelastgallon 2y agoGoogle search's biggest threat is Amazon. People buying stuff search directly on Amazon.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago#notallpeoplebuyingstuff
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- wslh 2y agoThe volume of search ads I see increased dramatically since one year ago. Just adding a data point to the discussion.
- metadat 2y agoYes, and this strategy is only good for one or two pumps, because the advertisers will eventually notice the lower engagement rate per dollar of spend and reduce their commitment accordingly. I'm curious what 2025 will look like for Elgoog. There are only so many desperate death throw spin tweaks available before the opportunities for indirection are exhausted.
- wslh 2y agoI think so, as an early AdWords small advertiser, in the first cycle most of the inbound sales were explained by SEO and Ads, then SEO continued to be more important than Ads but Ads declined, then SEO was an impossible game and we run Ads just because we assigned a budget for Ads, then I hired three different agencies for optimizing AdWords campaigns for a niche market and nothing happened... so I started thinking AdWords is a kind of scam for small companies.
- w34t 2y agoBut Google and Meta can easily manufacture views for whoever pays the most by showing those ads more. And then every other advertiser has compete with that price. I mean if 2 big movies are being released this weekend and one producer is willing to spend 5 million on ads then pressure on the other producer goes up to spend 6. Its not that simple or scientific to connect how the movies perform to the ads. Same with politics. One jackass raises 100k to spend on ads then their opponent feels pressure to raise and spend the same or more. There is lot of fomo driving this machine. On top of it Corps love to say the people are buying what they want. But google results show corps are spending a hell of a lot influence who buys what. So are people driving real demand or ad spend driving it? Everyone is competing furiously for limited Attention. How do you get noticed in a room called the internet where everyone is trying to capture attention simultaneously. It feels like in such an environment of attention scarcity Google and Facebook are like the Oil Cartel. They can control the price.
- uejfiweun 2y agoI think Google still beats the various AI tools for any use case where you need to find a real world thing or decide between real world things. Which are also the primary types of queries that drive advertising revenue for Google. Yeah, ChatGPT has replaced searching Google for stack overflow answers, but it's not like you were clicking on ads when looking for programming answers anyway.
- arathis 2y agoAlso worth noting that ChatGPT, while big in tech circles, most people don't use it day to day.
- blackoil 2y agoFirst, most lucrative markets like travel, product search etc. are still all on Google. Certain growth in them is coming along with GDP growth. Second, Google can still be optimizing/increasing no. of ads served.
- ml-anon 2y agoPerplexity especially is absolute garbage for 99% of people and their use cases. Google search is instant, available from every browser window and works with minimal keystrokes. LLM based search is such a bad experience on mobile where verifying the likely nonsense response is even more of an expensive task.
- barrkel 2y agoI have never used an LLM for buying intent and those are the valuable queries, AIUI.
- MaximilianEmel 2y agoThe same kind of people who try alternatives are likely using adblockers, therefore they weren't positively affecting Google's earnings anyway.
- DanielHB 2y ago> I guess our demographic is not predictive of the larger market. I think it is, "our demographic" is just a few years ahead of the masses. For example MacBooks started getting popular with programmers way before they got popular with the masses.