Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google is screwed, even if it wins its antitrust case

gizmodo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 166 posts

Re: Google is screwed, even if it wins its antitrust case

#141

Post by edgyquant »

smallerfish wrote: post #26
jchw wrote: post #14

Google is probably screwed without it. Even if ad-tech isn't exactly a bubble, I strongly believe it is overvalued even still. Furthermore, the product that made their name is thoroughly lost. I dread Google Search today. If I found something on Google yesterday, I have no idea if I'll be able to locate it through the sea of blog SPAM and SEO garbage tomorrow. Google web search strongly favors big websites when somet…

Almost a meme at this point: > I am not trying to suggest Duck Duck Go or Bing are actually better overall Kagi is, however. Well worth putting your money where your mouth is and supporting them.

Yep. Let those below argue over “they want a credit card!” as if that isn’t exactly what people have been begging for. I gladly pay for Kagi and people who are now complaining because it doesn’t have some esoteric payment method were never looking to have the problem solved in the first place.

I’m not sure what these people are searching for but I want to pay for a search engine that doesn’t show ads and doesn’t track me. A credit card comes with the territory for mass adoption.

Re: Google is screwed, even if it wins its antitrust case

#142

Post by edgyquant »

randmeerkat wrote: post #42
smallerfish wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost a meme at this point: > I am not trying to suggest Duck Duck Go or Bing are actually better overall Kagi is, however. Well worth putting your money where your mouth is and supporting them.

So, I googled Kagi, found their link… Not only is it required to create an account to use their service, they want a credit card to bill as well! Hard pass.

Cool. Continue using Google then.

Re: Google is screwed, even if it wins its antitrust case

#143

Post by ipython »

jamie_ca wrote: post #134
branon wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big YouTubers have seen the writing on the wall, and have been diversifying income streams for years. A lot of artists are migrating towards the "patron" model (think Renaissance patronage, but crowd-sourced) using tools like Patreon or Liberapay. This strikes me as inherently more pure than throwing videos at Google's algorithm to see which one can bring home the biggest slice of automatic-ad-revenue pie. The attent…

Yeah, the 1000 fans thing can totally work, depending on what your market looks like. $10/mo * 1000 is $120k/yr, which is a perfectly reasonable stable base from which to pursue a creative career (music, art, indie game dev, writing). And if you can make it to 1000, it's pretty easy to make it to 2000, and then more - of course just getting to that 1000 can be a long slow challenge to be sure.

That is a lot of money for one creator to command per month. I can’t imagine spending $120/yr just for one YouTubers content.

Re: Google is screwed, even if it wins its antitrust case

#144

Post by dragonwriter »

branon wrote: post #110
spijdar wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only thing I really have any strong affection for is YouTube, and the people and content that made the platform special are constantly unhappy with it's corporate direction, not to mention the utter lack of support, claiming and affirming in appeals stupid pointless crap like "you said a naughty word in the first ten seconds of the video" when anyone with working ears can easily verify they did not. This is mos…

Big YouTubers have seen the writing on the wall, and have been diversifying income streams for years. A lot of artists are migrating towards the "patron" model (think Renaissance patronage, but crowd-sourced) using tools like Patreon or Liberapay. This strikes me as inherently more pure than throwing videos at Google's algorithm to see which one can bring home the biggest slice of automatic-ad-revenue pie. The attent…

> A lot of artists are migrating towards the "patron" model

If ad revenue shrinks, making ads less useful for them (or even if not, given the patronage trend) why wouldn’t Google just enable the patronage model as a monetization model within YouTube, unencumbered by concerns for ad-based (or general audience) monetization.

Going to a three-tier (1) free/nonmonetized, (2) premium (with or without ads as an alternative to viewer-pays-google flat rate), (3) paid-subscriber-only model for content (where any creator could particpate in any combination of tiwrs with different content), where the last would be free of most of the content monetization, or even just content, restrictions that apply at the other tiers, would seem to be a fairly simple and natural evolution of the service. And you could easily have the Google share at the last (and even the middle tier) ratchet down with longevity and established user base so you'd pay a bigger share when you benefit most from the platform for discovery, and less when you need it less.

Re: Google is screwed, even if it wins its antitrust case

#145

Post by summerlight »

blibble wrote: post #74
idontwantthis wrote: post #5

I don’t think comparing IBM to Microsoft is fair or accurate. Microsoft is incredibly relevant and valuable today, many years after ending its antitrust investigation.

20 years ago MS had total dominance over the computer industry (like IBM 20 years before that) now MS aren't even trendsetter, but they are still raking in the cash they are pretty much exactly where IBM was 20 years ago

But ChatGPT is widely considered as an MS product, behind the OpenAI branding. MS under Satya Nadella is a different company from under Steve Balmer; it is setting, or at least trying to set the tech trend.

Re: Google is screwed, even if it wins its antitrust case

#146

Post by summerlight »

jliptzin wrote: post #40

I don’t understand arguments that say google will be left in the dust when it comes to AI. There’s no network effects like Facebook, it just takes a lot of money to train the models, which google obviously has. Do we really believe google, with all its resources and engineering talent, has no ability to develop something on par with OpenAI?

In fact Google has a bunch of SOTA LLM models, some of them are (conservatively speaking) several months ahead of OpenAI's. It's really interesting to see those people who believe (or want to see) Google being an underdog in the area of machine learning, but it's actually not. It's something similar to say that Tesla is years ahead of Waymo or Cruise.

Re: Google is screwed, even if it wins its antitrust case

#147

Post by Groxx »

minsc_and_boo wrote: post #107
Groxx wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't turn out to be existential, but they absolutely lost the Social "war" and it's costing them billions: Facebook owns a large chunk of all ad revenue now, in no small part because of this. Not that I'm complaining - the less that's under a mega-conglomerate, the better things tend to be. But it was and is a gigantic failure for Google, possibly their largest ever.

>Facebook owns a large chunk of all ad revenue now Facebook rode the wave of open 3P consumer data which is now closing everywhere, from DMA to iOS restrictions. That's why they're trying desperately to pivot to the metaverse, so they can use first party data. Facebook is currently experiencing an existential threat. Social media diminished to algortihmic media (e.g. TikTok) which will likely diminish to AI media soo…

Definitely - fast ecosystem shifts are the nature of social sites and I'm glad the market is re-learning this... to some degree anyway.

Google can still point to it and say "billions missed out on" though, and not a single person in the board room will disagree.

Meta-wise, I'm glad the acronym is now MANGA, and I have my popcorn ready. The metaverse is the second biggest joke I've seen this much money spent on, second only to NFTs. I quite like VR, but "owning" "the metaverse" is unbelievable nonsense.

Re: Google is screwed, even if it wins its antitrust case

#148

Post by pseudo0 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #144
branon wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big YouTubers have seen the writing on the wall, and have been diversifying income streams for years. A lot of artists are migrating towards the "patron" model (think Renaissance patronage, but crowd-sourced) using tools like Patreon or Liberapay. This strikes me as inherently more pure than throwing videos at Google's algorithm to see which one can bring home the biggest slice of automatic-ad-revenue pie. The attent…

> A lot of artists are migrating towards the "patron" model If ad revenue shrinks, making ads less useful for them (or even if not, given the patronage trend) why wouldn’t Google just enable the patronage model as a monetization model within YouTube, unencumbered by concerns for ad-based (or general audience) monetization. Going to a three-tier (1) free/nonmonetized, (2) premium (with or without ads as an alternative…

Google has already created channel memberships, where the channel can offer perks like member-only content in exchange for additional payment to the channel owner. It certainly looks like an attempt to squeeze out Patreon and similar services.

The catch is that Google gets a 30% cut, compared to 3-5% for Patreon and such.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7491256

Re: Google is screwed, even if it wins its antitrust case

#149

Post by Forgeties79 »

telchior wrote: post #139
Forgeties79 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This kind of problem isn't just because of search, it's also because of content creators. See I think this becomes chicken/egg real quick too, though I do think Google is more to blame. Content creators are responding to the incentives google created. Think back to when sites would have all sorts of keywords buried in metadata and/or have blogs that were complete nonsense full of keywords that weren't easily findabl…

Yeah, but penalizing people based on metadata or keyword lists is incredibly easy. Compare that to trying to figure out which recipe site is keyword stuffing vs which happens to have a story by someone who really did journey to Tuscany to learn the perfect cacciucco recipe. Sometimes I've fantasized about Google having human editorial that would evaluate these content farms as they grow and make the nuanced decisions…

Hell just threaten it and make a few examples of folks to dissuade it. A business isn’t going to risk it if they’re worried they could be the unlucky ones. The ones hitting the top search results aren’t randoms making hundreds of sites, it’s often just C-tier blog sites that depend on dishing this stuff out regularly to get ad traffic.

I’m not saying I have all the answers here but I feel like this shouldn’t be too hard to at least make a dent in.

Re: Google is screwed, even if it wins its antitrust case

#150

Post by Tagbert »

lordnacho wrote: post #46
jchw wrote: post #14

Google is probably screwed without it. Even if ad-tech isn't exactly a bubble, I strongly believe it is overvalued even still. Furthermore, the product that made their name is thoroughly lost. I dread Google Search today. If I found something on Google yesterday, I have no idea if I'll be able to locate it through the sea of blog SPAM and SEO garbage tomorrow. Google web search strongly favors big websites when somet…

I use search for coding a lot, and lately I've noticed it's hard to find what I'm after. If I'm looking for some small thing like what an sftp command looks like, I don't want an SEO essay about why SSH is great and we should all use encryption. I just want the example line. This seems to be what ChatGPT can give me. It doesn't always work, but it also doesn't beat around the bush.

Until ChatGPT starts giving you responses crafted from those SEO sites.
Post reply on HN