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Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results

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Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results

#21

Post by breppp »

jvolkman wrote: post #13
Centigonal wrote: post #2

crazy work from whoever at Alphabet is in charge of selecting domain names for their sites.

That's been Alphabet's site since the restructuring happened back in 2015. The site has barely changed in a decade.

from doc.new to blog.google, they are on top of that

Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results

#22

Post by eykanal »

adverbly wrote: post #4

22% 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!

Google was one of the earlier companies to do mass layoffs, back in 2023: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/google-to-lay-off-12000-peop...

Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results

#23

Post by mattmaroon »

kridsdale3 wrote: post #11

12 months ago everyone agreed that Search was doomed, ChatGPT would kill Google, and Bard/Gemini were a joke.

When I went through YC in 2007 a founder whose name you know drunkenly told me at a party that Google Docs and Macbooks would have Microsoft out of business by 2012. Someone here told me in 2018 I was nuts to buy a gas-powered car because in less time than you would drive a car for, everyone will have switched to electric and there will be no gas stations left.

The impending deaths of most things are greatly exaggerated.

Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results

#25

Post by mattmaroon »

next_xibalba wrote: post #9
mgh2 wrote: post #7

Google 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...

I don't follow this stuff too closely, but Cloud growing by 63% seems astounding. It'd be interesting to know how much of that is converting AWS and Azure workloads to GCP.

Or deals with their own/third party LLMs?

Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results

#26

Post by nostrademons »

throwaway_20357 wrote: post #12
mgh2 wrote: post #7

Google 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...

Can anyone explain how search revenue is still _growing_ in the age of LLMs?

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 pharmaceuticals. A couple of portfolio companies have reported that it's becoming basically impossible to make any money off of a new product, because you need to advertise it to reach the customer, and Google will skim all the excess producer surplus off as you compete with other startups serving the same market.

It's basically the perfect business model. They own the path to the consumer, which means they own the economy.

I'd also recently hired someone out of Google Search, and they said that the only queries that "legacy" (non-AI-mode) search cares about are commercial-seeking queries, and the only metric they optimize for is ad conversions on those. It literally is thousands of people whose only job is to get you to click more ads.

Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results

#27

Post by duodecimal »

throwaway_20357 wrote: post #12
mgh2 wrote: post #7

Google 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...

Can anyone explain how search revenue is still _growing_ in the age of LLMs?

Many LLM agents do automated web searches.

Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results

#28

Post by mattmaroon »

mgh2 wrote: post #10
impulser_ wrote: post #6

Everyone thought Google Search would die from AI, but people are searching more than ever.

Not sure how they will justify zero click to advertisers though, except youtube. https://www.google.com/search?q=did+google+seach+increase&oq...

I think they make most of their money off searches with intent (“vehicle detailing near me”) and things for which they still send you somewhere. The kind of searches that an LLM can just answer probably largely just sent you to Wikipedia or somewhere nobody was paying much for anyway.

It’s possible AI will do a better job of capturing ad dollars by better serving intentional searchers.

Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results

#29

Post by amazingamazing »

throwaway_20357 wrote: post #12
mgh2 wrote: post #7

Google 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...

Can anyone explain how search revenue is still _growing_ in the age of LLMs?

Why would llms replace search? It was a crazy take in 2023 and is still one today. Suppose there are no search engines and you want to find some headphones. How exactly are you doing this with llms?
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