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Google Earning Q1 2024 [pdf]

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Re: Google Earning Q1 2024 [pdf]

#162
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have moved to Kagi as my search engine, although 99.99..% of people will probably never pay for search. Anecdotally, whenever I'm not finding what I need on Kagi and fallback to Google (less than once per week), it's shocking what a disaster the UX of Google's products have become (Maps is an even bigger offender than Search, where seemingly arbitrarily labeled places get more visibility than the search results).

What do you use instead of Google Maps? I don't know enough about alternatives to choose one.

What's even the google hate? the company is great and provides value. Why go into the rabbit hole of worse products?

Re: Google Earning Q1 2024 [pdf]

#163
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This site has always been a bubble.

Indeed. Most of the commenters here really have no clue of what is going on and are just reacting to the headlines. I'm very delighted that I bought GOOGL stock at $95 when it fell after everyone panicked at their Bard demo a year ago. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34713073

I'm bullish on GOOGL - Gemini 1.5 Pro is insanely good! GCP is also democratizing the cloud; I think the market share will only increase.

Re: Google Earning Q1 2024 [pdf]

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stock buybacks are done when a company think either 1. they are massively under valued, or 2. when there isn't a better investment for their cash.

Google does it regularly as they pay out so much RSUs they want to keep the same number of shares on the market. You can look and see them historically doing this

A side effect is avoiding dilution from RSU grants.

Poster is correct: that is not the reason for them.

We can confirm this. Compare RSUs granted/year -- $150M -- to buybacks this quarter -- $70B. ~700x as much.

Re: Google Earning Q1 2024 [pdf]

#165
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The volume of search ads I see increased dramatically since one year ago. Just adding a data point to the discussion.

Yes, and this strategy is only good for one or two pumps, because the advertisers will eventually notice the lower engagement rate per dollar of spend and reduce their commitment accordingly. I'm curious what 2025 will look like for Elgoog. There are only so many desperate death throw spin tweaks available before the opportunities for indirection are exhausted.

I think so, as an early AdWords small advertiser, in the first cycle most of the inbound sales were explained by SEO and Ads, then SEO continued to be more important than Ads but Ads declined, then SEO was an impossible game and we run Ads just because we assigned a budget for Ads, then I hired three different agencies for optimizing AdWords campaigns for a niche market and nothing happened... so I started thinking AdWords is a kind of scam for small companies.

Re: Google Earning Q1 2024 [pdf]

#166
post #157

It's going to take a long time for alternatives to make inroads into Google. There are lots of marketing dollars looking for a home, and Google is going to be one of the better bets for some time to come. They may turn into a zombie but they won't die for a long, long time. For example, cable companies still exist and have a ton of paid ads on them. Fox makes $3-5B in sales per quarter: https://valustox.com/FOXA Sinc…

With the amount of mindshare, infrastructure and over 90% of the search engine market share that Google has, it will take decades to even begin to challenge Google's market share in search. We've seen this with Neeva which is now no more. Perplexity appears to be no different and only appeals to techies and at the same time is already dependent on Google search for their results, according to The Information. In fact…

They'll probably never budge from the top of the search pile.

But search itself may decline over time.

The same happened to everyone from steam train companies to Xerox to cable companies. These guys are next.

Re: Google Earning Q1 2024 [pdf]

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was asking GPT some question reg a Postgres feature , it gave me the answer with the caveat that it's knowledgebase hadn't been updated in a year. I went right back to google.

lol at people still using Google. Kagi is far superior.

Consider this: You ask a question (go to google) to solve a problem. But an LLM solve it for you. That's why they are popular in programming.

However, besides this, google is still my go to for relevant information on entertainment and news etc.

Re: Google Earning Q1 2024 [pdf]

#168
post #9

I 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…

I think this is the same thing I feel when I read Meta's earnings. I continue to see growth in usage of their core properties but I don't think my entire circle touches Facebook or even Instagram nearly as much. Whatsapp certainly isn't driving those ad dollars so it truly is remarkable how disconnected my demographic (loosely using my here) is from the overall world usage.

I'm not sure anyone under like 60 is frequently using Facebook as social media, but Facebook Marketplace is huge, Instagram is huge.

Re: Google Earning Q1 2024 [pdf]

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most companies would love to being "dying" like Google "is". Seriously, Google is not dying and making obviously false claims is not helpful.

Speaking as a shareholder here, a 2 trillion dollar valuation warrants extraordinary justification. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. As the AI models get better and better at compressing the world's information, people will be going directly to their model of choice

And it’s very likely that for 90% of people their model of choice will be at the other end of the Google/Chrome search box
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