[tdoggette]

> A company that can't figure out the difference between a scam like Better Homes and Gardens and a rigorous review site like Housefresh should be pouring every spare dime it brings in into fixing this problem. Not buying default search status on every platform so that we never try another search engine: they should be fixing their shit.

[AJ007]

Google has sucked for years, and the level of sucking has been covered extensively on hn.

The one thing that was a real shock was how much more gas was left in the ad model engine. They've managed to grow substantially over the past couple of years largely by pushing advertisers in to a ROAS model that is clearly optimized to make Google more money: gross almost 2x from 2019 to 2023 -- from $161b to $307b. Net income more than doubled -- from $34b to $73.8b.

Google, Google's employees, and Google's shareholders don't need nearly $1b in revenue a day. What they do just isn't that important anymore. That money is very much a tax, and ultimately the money consumers are paying for products and services is going to Google instead of making the product or service better.

The good news is there are now many alternatives that work as well or better than Google. Combine that with LLM options (Perplexity, ChatGPT), and the future looks Google-lite or Google-free. It would be even better if we had more decentralized & localized search options like YaCy. If we want to have any control over our search future we need it.

I'll just keep repeating this: Google today is a yellow pages. For search they offer little of value that isn't provided by others. Old people keep using Google because that's what they have been using for years or because it just shows up (like the yellow pages did, but now as a default.)

[Topgamer7]

A few weeks ago I bit the bullet and paid for kagi, as a dev it's night and day for finding documentation and relevant, non-spammy results.

[nicbou]

Do you know how well it works for travel stuff? Google has become particularly useless at surfacing local blogs and results over content marketing from travel services.

[15457345234]

Was it actually revenue growth from adverts or was it from a sudden splurge in pandemic-era spending caused by governments all over the world panic-signing up for Google Classroom and buying Chromebooks?

Because I can see pretty much all of the 'growth' that occurred during 2020-2021 being unwound gradually as people realise that a lot of what happened was an absolute disaster for society.

When it comes to making any predictions for the future you really have to write off the 2019-2021 pandemic era figures as a glitch.

[tdb7893]

Their financials are public, from my reading the growth was not driven by Chromebooks or classroom (unfortunately for Google since they would love to diversify from search/ads)

[chucke1992]

Yeah, I think the future will be a more fragment, AI-driven search that will be integrated into everything via plugins in browsers, apps and native integration. You reading something -> search information about something, or find the community.

[wyclif]

What about Brave search? Does anyone know what they are doing behind the scenes? It's ad-free by default, and emphasizes privacy as a core feature.

[raid2000]

Well summarized. Anti-competition has become the new standard operating model.

[_heimdall]

At least in the US, I believe we've proven that anti-competition regulations don't work and that the government realized its easier to regulate the consumer than to deal with regulating massive corporations.

If you want to win reelection you're much better off taking massive piles of cash from big businesses and regulate consumers to help create the monopolies. Trying to protect consumers by breaking up monopolies and promoting healthy market competition will see you leaving office in a hurry.

[dotnet00]

In the US we've proven that it's easiest to just talk about anti-competition regulation to buy votes and then never actually get around to improving or enforcing it. After all, if you solve problems, you lose platforms to run the next election on.

[teaearlgraycold]

I don’t think that last sentence follows. There are always more problems to solve. They’re just stupid and lazy and loyal to their owners.

[dotnet00]

There are always more problems, but for example, it's a lot easier to get voters heated over abortion rights than it is over whether or not a national ID should carry biometric data.

[_heimdall]

I'd argue there are always more problems, we don't have to solve them all nor should we assume that we can.

[nicoburns]

> I believe we've proven that anti-competition regulations don't work

You have? How? You barely have any. And the ones you do have you rarely enforce.

> Trying to protect consumers by breaking up monopolies and promoting healthy market competition will see you leaving office in a hurry.

That sounds like a flaw in your political/electoral system not in anti-competition regulations.

[mistrial9]

I agree with the sentiment here but..

> You barely have any .. anti-competition regulations

this is not true. However, the secrecy implemented around enforcement (bad publicity) causes the casual observer to think so..

There are very large enforcement actions that take place regularly.. they are far from perfect, and the failures tend to be the ones that are amplified in media..

[AnthonyMouse]

> this is not true. However, the secrecy implemented around enforcement (bad publicity) causes the casual observer to think so..

That isn't the reason it isn't true. The US nominally has quite strong antitrust laws. The statutes are extremely broad in what they prohibit. But the enforcement is lacking and the courts over time have read the laws more narrowly than they were intended to be.

> the failures tend to be the ones that are amplified in media..

The failures are prolific. In a functioning regulatory environment, whether because you don't have regulations that prop up incumbents and don't create regulatory barriers to entry or because you break them up and stop them from buying each other, you wouldn't have industries where any one company has more than 15% of the market. But that is common, not rare, and that is the measure of it working.

[feetsoup]

>In a functioning regulatory environment [...] you wouldn't have industries where any one company has more than 15% of the market.

Is that realistic? Intuition is telling me that's very idealistic but I'm prepared to be surprised

[_heimdall]

> You have? How? You barely have any. And the ones you do have you rarely enforce.

Lack of enforcement was actually part of my point. More broadly, though, we don't need more regulation so much as we need less legal protections that allow companies to get away with it.

> That sounds like a flaw in your political/electoral system not in anti-competition regulations.

No disagreements at all that our political and electoral system is flawed. I'm not so sure if that's the direct cause here though or if its the other way around. Meaning, we could be here because runaway anticompetitive behavior led to political and regulatory capture rather than the flawed political system being the proximal cause.

[bratbag]

I think you are missing the third leg of this, which is how those monopolies extend outside of the US and act as part of the states global soft power strategy in those other countries where they are also monopolies.

The US is no more likely to break them up as it is to cut its military budget in half.

[voisin]

Comrade, if you think the US is bad you should come check out Canada.

[wyclif]

Google could fix it tomorrow if they wanted to, but the fact is they don't because there's no incentive for their business, which is advertising. As Upton Sinclair once put it, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

[from-nibly]

They absolutely can't. They've innovators dilemma'd themselves. Their cash cow is not making sense any more and they can't investigate any new technologies to save themselves.

They came out with Gemini really late and they look like they don't know what they're doing. They are going to be late to the next disruptor too

[chucke1992]

Google is basically becoming IBM of this era.