71–80 of 136 posts
But they're presumably investing more in it, since Other Bets income fell from $-1,226M to $-2,100M, meaning expenditure went up $800M YoY. (Obviously not all of this was Waymo though.)
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?
Personally I use AI chatbots to help me make every purchase decision I have to think about.
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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.
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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?
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…
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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...
AFAIK this is literally the only time google has laid more than a few thousand off at once
Google has cost-cut their old hiring and performance management processes, and eliminated many perks and benefits that were peculiar to Google. As the unique characteristics of Google as an institution are pared away, it makes sense that they would also adopt the standard approach to layoffs and that is what we have seen since 2023.
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Can anyone explain how search revenue is still _growing_ in the age of LLMs?
Gemini in search (AI Overview) is likely the most used LLM in the world, and ads can still surface around it. (googler, opinions are my own. I know nothing about this outside of external info)
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…
The reason you don't hear people complaining (esp on HN) is because noone is using Gemini with coding agents. Claude Code, Codex (and IMO OpenCode et al with open weights models) are miles ahead of Gemini CLI/Jules/Antigravity/whatever other coding products Google have.
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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
I keep thinking how often LLMs are used to “solve” problems we created.
“Meeting starts at 3” gets fed into an LLM to turn it into a 3 paragraph email, only to be summarized by a different LLM on the other email client end as “Meeting starts at 3”. What a waste.
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?
AI overview (organic for now?)
3 organic results (below the fold)
2 paid search results
Image results
1 organic result
If I don't run paid ads I don't get leads I rank organically for a lot of the keyphrases I'm bidding on (top 3 results)...organic 0-2 calls a week, paid ads 4-6 calls a week (niche business).