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Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results

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Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results

#41

Post by _the_inflator »

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!

I have internal knowledge, I am closely affiliated with Google.

Infrastructure and scalability has been and is key, as well as technical expertise still absolutely super top notch.

Let’s put it this way: Google is the only company that knows how to find, store and utilize information beyond a specific narrowing. And I mean it really in the sense of curating, compression, long time storage, load balancing as well as compliance and world wide redundancy with a focus on speed and efficiency.

Under the hood of AI is pure engineering genius. Google might be trashed as the Search Engine giant that only displays ads now, but reconsider.

Why does all AI provider except for Google have massive problems with load time, reach, etc? Apple chose Google mainly because of the infrastructure. They eat everyone for lunch here. And they earned it.

Engineering at Google etc. are still the finest you can read about software engineering at the highest level. It is highly impressive how Google managed to not fall behind OpenAI. Who else was able to join the race? Microsoft? No. Apple? Oh well… Meta etc. won’t get there ever.

I think that Gemini is 3rd behind OpenAI and Claude but mainly because Google being Google, they kind of have no versioning for their AI and therefore the results are pretty much random in quality, less predictable than the others.

But the creativity and tooling like Nano Banana - fantastic.

There you have it. People don’t get that it is the infrastructure the moment they complain about Claude outtakes here.

Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results

#42

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

breppp wrote: post #21
jvolkman wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Also they have got some cool ipv4 range like 8.8.8.8 too

(Edit I had confused it earlier with 1.1.1.1 which is from cloudflare)

Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results

#43

Post by shimon »

mattmaroon wrote: post #25
next_xibalba wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

LLM/AI growth is the major driver of usage growth on all the clouds.

Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results

#44

Post by mykowebhn »

mattmaroon wrote: post #23
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 exaggera…

I wonder how much of that is driven by organic market forces or through anti-competitive practices.

For example, Chinese electric vehicles are selling like hotcakes in Europe but you'd be hard-pressed to find any in the US.

Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results

#45

Post by bitpush »

mgh2 wrote: post #33
nostrademons wrote: post #26

Earlier 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…

Is there some writing on the wall? In the future if LLMs are more efficient and eventually commoditized, needing less infraestructure to be run (think on-device as chip efficiency increases). Apple can eventually just make their own, and provided they don’t benefit from the Google partnership anymore, who will need a search engine aside from Android and PCs?

> In the future if LLMs are more efficient and eventually commoditized, needing less infraestructure to be run (think on-device as chip efficiency increases).

You speak as if this is given. Sure, LLMs are gonna get effective but frontier ones are always going to be hosted.

Also, on-device LLMs are gonna have a 'cutoff' for training data. You cant ask a gpt-oss4 about "Who won Arsenal x Athetico Madrid game". It has to go to the internet, and do the 'search'. You certainly cant ask the local model "What was Google's Q1 2026 earnings".

The self-hosted / on-device LLMs are going to do a lot, but not all and the moment 'search' is involved, people will reach for Google.

--

Lots of commercial queries need to be 'fresh' ("Build me an itinerary for Paris"). While a self-hosted LLM can do it, you might not want to trust it, because its info might be stale.

I encourage you to go beyond group think (HN is guilty of that) and really evaluate your position is actually valid or not.

Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results

#46

Post by nickjj »

kridsdale3 wrote: post #11

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

Search is doomed for people creating content that depends on organic search traffic because Google's AI is providing the content directly to people doing the search.

My decade old tech blog with 500+ posts now gets 10x less traffic than it did a few years ago and I'm actually on the fence on pulling the plug on my 10 year old business because traffic is so low it now costs me more to host video courses that I sell than I make per month from them. In turn this comes with other implications, such as maybe stopping my YouTube channel and no longer contributing to open source because paying bills has priority over hobbies. I enjoy spending time on these things and morally was always ok with giving away almost everything I do and learned for free, but income requirements are very quick to slap you into reality.

Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results

#47

Post by grttee »

nostrademons wrote: post #26
throwaway_20357 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

This is absolute nonsense.

You are mangling a well defined term of producer surplus that is widely accepted in economics with your own.

Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results

#49

Post by bitpush »

_the_inflator wrote: post #41
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!

I have internal knowledge, I am closely affiliated with Google. Infrastructure and scalability has been and is key, as well as technical expertise still absolutely super top notch. Let’s put it this way: Google is the only company that knows how to find, store and utilize information beyond a specific narrowing. And I mean it really in the sense of curating, compression, long time storage, load balancing as well as c…

This is such an interesting take. Thank you.
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