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by switch11 2114 days ago
Very interesting comment

I'll try and give my perspective as someone who has spent a couple hundred thousand dollars on Google Adwords and also gets a lot of organic traffic from them, and also does a lot of work on Apple Apps and Android Apps

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you wrote:

TekMol 22 hours ago [–]

I think their idea is to combine that with signing the bundles, so a page from www.someserver.com can be served by anyone, aka Google. I guess this would mean Google can serve all content on the web.

There seems to be a strong urge in Google to cut the connection between then endpoints of the web and become the central authority. Make all traffic flow through their machines. Let no information arrive at the endpoints.

Right now, requests on the web are kind of p2p. A user requests a website, the publisher serves it any way they see fit. Directly via their servers or via a CDN of their choice.

Google seems to have a strong focus on ending this. Turning the web into Googlebook / AOLoogle.

I wonder why. Do they see their business model threatened on the open web? Or do they see a chance to increase their profit with a closed web?

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OK, so think of Google as

THE STARTING POINT that everyone uses for the Internet

There are 3 critical things required

A) Trust

B) Efficiency

C) No other starting points

Now, Google's problem is that it knows (like all technology companies) that things change very fast in technology

look at Facebook having to buy Instagram and then WhatsApp and then having to GovernmentAttack TikTok and not being able to buy Snap chat

Google, on the other hand, has a very serious issue

A) Its main 'starting point competitors' are not 'buyable' or 'governmentAttackable'

It is Amazon for starting point for shopping, Facebook for starting point for 'people who think the Internet is Facebook', and then new competitors like completely different search methodologies and vertical search engines that are not even 'search engines' but take away Google position

B) It has been following a policy of 'shift everything to google properties'

This creates worsening search results

this leads to a loss of trust and efficiency

Efficiency is really hampered because now a typical search engine user is spending 60% of their time avoiding 2nd quality Google products, to find the remaining 40% and then sort through those to find THE BEST OPTION

C) See, the thing is, that to shift everyone on to Google properties, Google is not just throwing lots of Google results in search, it is also hiding the BEST of BREED services or plain stealing their data (like Yelp and Genius)

D) Trust is further eroded with so much spying and anti privacy

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So Google is in this very unique situation where it has to do EXTREME measures

such as

try and shift everyone to AMP

try and shift everyone to Web Bundles

try and shift everyone to No Tracking Allowed except by Google

Think of someone who had the biggest trade port between two continents. And they make a TON of money

Then other ports started showing up

So what is their option?

buy up all the ports? what if that is not possible? What if peeping tom Facebook is not willing to sell their port?

then Google knows that sooner or later its port will become one of many and goodbye profits. Then they start pretending - only safe way to cross the ocean is on our ships. So EVERYONE can cross only on our ships

Very similar to FB being scared and starting Internet.org. Best way to eliminate competitors - control the ENTIRE internet and you choose who can be shown

by the way Tesla with StarLink and Amazon with Kuiper are also in position to do this (and not sure Tesla but Amazon definitely would)

turn the Internet into a Pay to Play zoo

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There are lots of other signs too

1) Google click quality is down

2) amount of click fraud is going up

we see clicks coming from Google Servers. on customer service they admit a certain percentage are fake whenever we see fake clicks, they will still charge us and then (on their own) do a token refund

So we see $100 of fake clicks. 12 hours later there is a token $5 refund for fake clicks (they use some other term, will have to check what)

2) amount of organic traffic you get depends on who much you spend

3) If you spend less, then they start showing negative results in organic search to affect sales from people coming to you anyways

Google has already crossed the inflection point. Unless they can magically buy FB and/or Amazon they are basically dead

Just to elaborate on that

They are squeezing every little bit out, even using lots of wrong methods to do that, becoming less and less value

MANY verticals people have switched COMPLETELY to FB and other advertising

Google is still good for many, many areas. However, they are so saturated and so inefficient at giving you bang for the buck, it's crazy

Meanwhile, FB will let you do anything you want to FB users, provided you pay them enough

So for advertisers who don't mind such a set up, FB is 10 times better

* A lot of Google advertising money is INERTIA

It's unfortunate that TikTok is getting ticktocked. Otherwise it would have eaten massively into Google's earnings

Google also has very high costs to remaing 'default' in the web browsers

They're paying Apple $10 billion a year to be default search

Apple should give them a fitting gift for them stealing iPhone ideas and design for Android and build its own search engine. Google market cap would halve within a year if Apple did that