You'd be crazy not to be long Google.
Alphabet was Warren Buffet's last "hold" pick afterall.
Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results
101–110 of 136 posts
Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Potentially but not in the way most people think. Non-commercial queries are basically a loss-leader for Google. They don't care about them, except that they keep people in the habit of Googling things whenever they need information, which is critical for the whole business model to work. That's why ChatGPT was such a threat: for a while it looked like people might get out of the habit of Googling things and instead…
I hope number 3 gets them. A modern icarus
I'd be both saddened and wryly amused if it was #3. I can just imagine the day: first the 500 server errors whenever you went to do a Google Search, then the frantic denials that there is a problem, the poor SREs that would be working overtime without any idea how to bring the system back, the pushes toward other projects, the Wall Street damage control, followed by the stock market crash as people realized it wasn't coming back. Imagine how much your habits would have to change if you couldn't access Google: a lot of people get to all their favorite websites through navigational searches.
It'd have to be a major black swan, though, because there are many layers of canaries and metrics checks and rollbacks and backups in place. I think the issue now is that an increasing number of Googlers don't realize why these are important, but Search was built for robustness.
Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results
#103crazy work from whoever at Alphabet is in charge of selecting domain names for their sites.
After all these years, I still think that this was a wasted opportunity on Google's side. As is well-known, Google (Googol) is a constant: 10^100. Instead of Alphabet, they should have named the umbrella company AlephBet [1] with a tag line: "we stopped thinking in constants".
Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results
#10422% YoY revenue increase. Doing something right. Maybe mass layoffs like Oracle/Meta/Amazon are doing isn't actually a good way to grow a company after all!
Layoffs might not be the best way to keep talent. Imo, Nintendo did it best back in 2014 [1].
[1] https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2014/01/iwata_and_miyamoto...
Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results
#105Google grew revenue 22% YoY and operating income 30%, with growing margins. Search revenue still growing 19%, an acceleration vs YoY growth this time last year. Cloud grew revenue 63%. Cloud income up from $2.2b Q1’25 to $6.6b Q1’26. https://www.reddit.com/r/stocks/comments/1sza7xi/alphabet_be...
Who is the competition or why is there no competition? Surely disrupting this industry is possible?
Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my example there are no search engines. And if there were why would they allow tool calls?
Your premise is absurd. Search engines do exist, and search engines do allow tool calls. Try find an AI chat provider that doesn't connect web search to the agent.
Bing and google do not give you free and unlimited calls. And of course there are many clients… which harness lets you call bing or google on all devices locally?
As far as the premise goes, people on this very site were saying it. The very parent is surprised search is growing.
Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you looked at the results for any commercial query, something like [sofa beds] or [hard drives]? It is basically 100% ads. Anything where the user is intending to spend money, they show only ads, and have all the top producers in the world bid against each other for who gets featured, and Google captures essentially all surplus value in the transaction. My wife is an investor, and one of her portfolio areas is p…
sounds like a new chapter in Das Kapital.
IMNSHO there is actually a profound economic insight in there, which is that you will face a drag on economic activity whenever a private party owns a portion of the path to the consumer. Think of the path to the consumer in say the 1880s: you went to the local general store, you met the vendor in person, you handed over cash, you got the goods. Not many areas where a third-party could interpose themselves to collect tolls; maybe the general store owner could, and many of them ended up quite locally wealthy, but their profits were capped by your ability to go to the next town over.
Now think about today. You search on Google and they run an auction to charge the vendor for getting their products discovered. You go to their website, but their website needs to be protected by CloudFlare from all the people who would take it offline. You buy the product with your Visa, which takes their ~1.6% merchant fee. They sell it with Stripe, which takes their 2.7% fee. You pay shipping and handling for UPS or FedEx to deliver it. Local, state, and federal governments all take tax out of this. Increasingly we're getting national-level shakedowns like Iran charging tolls for the Straight of Hormuz now.
Note that it was similar in olden times whenever one party could control the flow of goods between producer and customer. Sea merchants made huge profits in the 1500-1600s. Standard Oil got to be huge with its control of the distribution infrastructure for oil.
European governments have actually woken up to this with passage of laws like the DMA, but the American government has taken the other tack and decided that if life is a massive shakedown it's going to get in on the extortion business.
Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results
#108Google grew revenue 22% YoY and operating income 30%, with growing margins. Search revenue still growing 19%, an acceleration vs YoY growth this time last year. Cloud grew revenue 63%. Cloud income up from $2.2b Q1’25 to $6.6b Q1’26. https://www.reddit.com/r/stocks/comments/1sza7xi/alphabet_be...
Who is the competition or why is there no competition? Surely disrupting this industry is possible?
Meta is a huge competitor. The have less fewer ads for directed searches of course, but know you were browsing products on the web so can spam you all over for the types of things you were shopping for.
Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you looked at the results for any commercial query, something like [sofa beds] or [hard drives]? It is basically 100% ads. Anything where the user is intending to spend money, they show only ads, and have all the top producers in the world bid against each other for who gets featured, and Google captures essentially all surplus value in the transaction. My wife is an investor, and one of her portfolio areas is p…
Doesn't even have to be a query where you intend to spend money, I can't tell you the amount of times I look something up wondering if it exists or to learn more about it and it tries to sell me something
This is, annoyingly, because bare noun phrases as a search term are highly correlated with an intent to buy.
You get completely different results if you search for "what is a sofa bed" instead of "sofa bed".
I say it's annoying, but it comes from real user behavior.
Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you looked at the results for any commercial query, something like [sofa beds] or [hard drives]? It is basically 100% ads. Anything where the user is intending to spend money, they show only ads, and have all the top producers in the world bid against each other for who gets featured, and Google captures essentially all surplus value in the transaction. My wife is an investor, and one of her portfolio areas is p…
The open decentralized internet of the 2000s was one of the greatest common goods in human history. It makes me incredibly sad to see it destroyed so quickly. The niche blogs and forums that still exist are still incredibly useful when I stumble on one researching a niche topic, but I know their days are numbered with search traffic rapidly going to zero. Maybe in the future something comparable will be invented and…
I don't think anything similar can exist in the future. The reason the internet was good for a while is because before 2005 and especially before 2000 mostly intelligent and relatively wealthy people had influence. Once everyone gets access quality just goes down.