Fascinating that they’re issuing a dividend. Can’t find anything better to do to drive growth?
Funnily enough, Peter Thiel called this years ago.
Google Earning Q1 2024 [pdf]
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Re: Google Earning Q1 2024 [pdf]
#42I 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 gue…
Google 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.
Re: Google Earning Q1 2024 [pdf]
#43> Alphabet’s Board of Directors today authorized the company to repurchase up to an additional $70.0 billion of its Class A and Class C shares in a manner deemed in the best interest of the company and its stockholders The most important item on the report
Also...10,000 fired... Employees previous equivalent quarter:190,711 and now:180,895 Edit: 190,711 employees on March 31, 2023
Layoff is not the same as "fired". Please use the correct terminology in consideration for those who lost their jobs.
Also, the termination dates for those who were laid off in January 2023 would be around April 2023 (the layoff news came earlier due to WARN act), so the employee count as of 2023-03-31 might not include those people. This means a difference of ~10000 can be accounted for by the 2023-01-20 round of layoffs.
Re: Google Earning Q1 2024 [pdf]
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
> everyone in my social circle has moved on from going to Google first for information Or have they ?
I'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.
you will like perplexity pro then?
Re: Google Earning Q1 2024 [pdf]
#45Fascinating that they’re issuing a dividend. Can’t find anything better to do to drive growth?
Google has $100B+ of cash and is giving out $10B/yr as a dividend. I think they will be able to scrape something together if they have a good idea.
Yes - and what they’ve decided is a dividend. It’s the first in their history. I’m not saying it’s good or bad, but it’s something.
Re: Google Earning Q1 2024 [pdf]
#46Up 15% after hours on news that they will begin a large cash dividend and share repurchase program.
They have have been buying back stock for a very long time
Re: Google Earning Q1 2024 [pdf]
#47A possible endgame of this quest for growth is just mixing unlabeled ads directly in with search content. Effectively pay for ranking with some quality filter. I'm pretty sure it won't come to that, but worse things have happened.
Like this doesnt happen already and hasnt been the case for the last 10 years?
Re: Google Earning Q1 2024 [pdf]
#48I 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 gue…
This site has always been a bubble.
Agreed. 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.
Re: Google Earning Q1 2024 [pdf]
#49Fascinating that they’re issuing a dividend. Can’t find anything better to do to drive growth?
Dividends were originally the main point of owning corporate stocks in the first place.
Re: Google Earning Q1 2024 [pdf]
#50A possible endgame of this quest for growth is just mixing unlabeled ads directly in with search content. Effectively pay for ranking with some quality filter. I'm pretty sure it won't come to that, but worse things have happened.
Injecting ads into the actual search results looks egregious today, but will be the norm later.