Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google's flagship product is a box that you can type words into, and get relevant texts/references/facts in response. It seems like a textbook example of AI.
AI is whatever hasn't been done yet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect#AI_is_whatever_hasn....
Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World
261–270 of 445 posts
Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World
#262Out of curiosity, is there a reason Google/Alphabet shouldn't be on the Dow?
Yes. It's because of the idiotic way the Dow formula works. The Dow is a price weighted index. To compute the value of the Dow, you sum the per-share prices of the constituents and divide by a magic divisor. So a $50 move in GOOG (~6.6% change) and a $50 move in AAPL (50% change) would have the exact same impact on the value of the index. The kludgey solution to this problem is just to not incorporate high priced sto…
The lower the price the easier to buy, so there should probably be some weighting on stock-price to remove some weekend warriors from the equation on many-shared stocks, and to reflect the barriers to entry on stocks like BRK.A.
Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends on how you defined "above the fold", but I have seen this on occasion. It's hard to replicate, though. For instance "credit card" is a search terms often overflowing with ads, but it's only giving a few to me right now. Where GP is wrong is that this is something "they did not do 5 years ago". There were a ton of articles complaining about it in 2008/2009. Unless it is happening on many times more search t…
>>The fact that the increase was YoY makes it even more dubious. YoY click growth percentage has been higher than traffic growth for years and years for Google. I suspect there are a number of reasons for it. The 100% ads above the fold did get a lot of complaints in 2014, specifically because Google announced it would penalize sites that did that. Quite a few examples of Google doing this were subsequently pointed o…
> There are many things they've done that are pretty subtle as well.
> The wikipedia information in the sidebar when you do informational searches used to have links to wikipedia...leading you away from google. They now keep you within Google, and include links to ads http://i.imgur.com/j3w9LbP.png
That still has a link to wikipedia
> Various widgets push organics down pretty far: http://i.imgur.com/VwYH7mY.png
That second box isn't an ad, it's just a called out search result.
> There are queries that became 100% above the folds ads within the last 1 or 2 years. Travel is especially aggressive: http://i.imgur.com/89iYCmc.png
As I said, this has been a thing for more than 5 or 6 years:
http://www.seobook.com/excuse-me-where-did-googles-organic-s... (from 2009)
> Other widgets that aren't ads per se, but serve to keep you on Google's site as you drill down to pages that will have ads: http://i.imgur.com/v1urMBm.png
They aren't ads per se...so would have at most a secondary effect on ad click through rates. It's also hard to argue that this (and the other) examples would be the cause of user harm as you argued above.
> YoY click growth percentage has been higher than traffic growth for years and years for Google.
You're missing my point because that's exactly it. Unless things have changed substantially in the last year, and every year before that, these things wouldn't explain the growth in click rates.
Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google's flagship product is a box that you can type words into, and get relevant texts/references/facts in response. It seems like a textbook example of AI.
Google's flagship product is an advertising platform, not a search box.
I would be inclined to say search is still their flagship. While advertising is their monetary powerhouse, it is still search that leads their fleet of products as a household name.
Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because Apple sells fashion products whereas Alphabet consists of a wide variety of companies with Google itself mostly making money with advertising? Other than having overlapping categories in their product and service portfolio, I have no idea how the two can be compared. I mean, Alphabet has military robots.
Alphabet has failed at military robots: http://m.theregister.co.uk/2015/12/29/us_marines_kill_off_bi...
In fact they didn't fail at all. Google had no intentions of going forward with military robots. They were very clear about that when they acquired Boston Dynamics.
Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
They certainly have failures, that's one of them. But nobody was sad when it got killed, you know? Nobody misses iTunes Ping or iAds or MobileMe.
> But nobody was sad when it got killed, you know Oh my, isn't that damning with faint praise? It's an indictment against Apple: Ping was so bad no one missed it.
Well, it's an indictment against Ping anyway. It would be mighty disingenuous to somehow suggest that level of failure is a statement of the possibility of future success for them considering how big their hits are.
Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you let me know how you use grep to search the internet as effectively as I do with Google, sure!
Effectively or Efficiently? I can search the internet way better. Email me what you are looking for and 9 times out of 10 I will send you back something better than what Google will spit out. Furthermore you won't even have to sift through 10 links, or change your search, I will do all this and send you the result back.
I bet you'll use google to do it.
Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World
#268Microsoft reached an intraday high share price of $119.94 in December 1999. With 5,160,024,593 outstanding shares, it had a market capitalization of $618.9 billion. then what? what next?
The glaring difference of course being that Microsoft was trading for roughly 88 times trailing earnings.
Google is trading for close to 30 times earnings with this latest quarter.
Google's valuation is obviously sustainable, Microsoft's was not at that time.
What's next? Google is likely to become even more valuable as they have a lot of growth left and investors clearly like to give them a nice multiple.
Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
70% of the revenue and (maybe) 80% of the profit of Apple comes from a single product - the iPhone. Apple themselves have given lower guidance going forward. There is a limit to the number of people buying iPhone at huge margins every year. The total units might continue to grow but not at the current margins and not as frequently. Hard to be bullish unless some other product takes off.
unlike Google, where practically 100% comes from one single product, which is ads. all "other bets" are actually losing money, per their data.
I'd compare Google's ads to consumer electronics as a category as opposed to the iPhone: they're many eggs, not just one. Search ads, DoubleClick, and AdSense are like the iPhone, iPad, and MacBook.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, on open-source software that doesn't have anything to do with ads.)
Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
Calling someone an "X company" means that they make their money from X. There are aspects of AI in targeted advertising, but not enough to call them an AI company rather than an advertising company. It doesn't really matter where they're going- that's what they aspire to be, not what they are. If you judge companies based on their aspirations, you end up judging them based on their most positive and idealistic versio…
> Calling someone an "X company" means that they make their money from X. There are aspects of AI in targeted advertising, but not enough to call them an AI company rather than an advertising company. eh, either way Google is described it's just trying to be a cute soundbite with next to no information. You can call them an advertising company, but they create the products that most of their ads are seen in, so reall…
Data centers are just the modern version of what used to be called plant and machinery, and Google is just an updated industrial corp in the tradition of other former and current household names, but with a slightly more colourful logo.
The business focus matters because the ad market is in trouble, and unless Alphabet has something in the pipeline to replace ads, five to ten years from now the company is going to be where Yahoo is today.
This seems hard to imagine now, but no one expected DEC to fail, or HP to turn into that thing it turned into, or Microsoft to sit on a grenade labelled "Windows", or IBM to drift off to the margins of the web - and so on.