Google is screwed, even if it wins its antitrust case

The big corporations that are doing the most harm are the food companies. They inject animals with antibiotics, kill millions of them in a very cruel manner, employ cheap illegal labor to process it and contaminate the environment beyond repair. The tech industry is bad but nothing compared to the irreparable harm the food industry causes.

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 sometimes the page you need is never going to be there. As an example, Google puts heavy weight on near-SPAM sites like Pinterest which produce almost no original content, and on abusive hosts like Fandom (formerly Wikia) who manages to beat out community wikis by replacing admins that try to migrate off and winning in SEO.

I am not trying to suggest Duck Duck Go or Bing are actually better overall, but if I see a web search covered in results like that, I sometimes find that they do in fact give me somewhat better result rankings.

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.

And that's the tip of the iceberg. I think a lot of ventures, like GMail, only ever made sense as computers and bandwidth just kept getting dramatically cheaper. It's difficult to beat free. Well, what happens when those things stop getting cheaper, and GMail keeps getting more expensive to run?

I don't think Google really wants to be 100% dependent on ad revenue, it's just a hard cord to cut.

They're trying to move into paid YouTube subs. They presumably could try the same with search.

> But Alphabet will probably be fine. YouTube and Android are still...

If you look at a revenue breakdown[1] and then also figure in that search has much higher margins than the other areas, it's pretty skewed to search dollars. They've improved it some, but there's a long way to go.

[1] https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/how-does-google-make-money

Yes, because this is a solvable problem probably easier than figuring out how to make it a useful product (like knowing what it doesn’t know and preventing convincing hallucinations in some scenarios while maintaining the ability to hallucinate for creative queries). There is a lot of work on approaches like using search retrieval methods like embedding similarity lookups, and then pasting summaries of the retrieved documents in as context. This allows the LLM to cite new data without retraining. (That’s also something google is very good at)