[mikewarot]

Google stopped being the best search engine, paid for my ad revenue into a profit driven monster somewhere along the way. A few years ago, someone had a big idea to try to answer questions rather than be a useful tool for finding answers. It's been downhill ever since.

As for stock value, it's all set by the most recent transactions, so you're really talking about expected value, not actual value. Actual value has been declining for a long time, and now expectations are catching up.

Google could pull out of this, but it would require a bit of a rethink. If I were Google king for a while, I'd try to put back the better search of the past, as "classic google" for those who need it.

Next I'd take the search results, and use an LLM and clustering to find the top 10 ideas in those results, and group the results accordingly. I'd be willing to bet all the SEO spam would fall into one group by the nature of the beast, and thus be easy to ignore for the users.