81–90 of 136 posts
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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)
Is it the most used LLM because people want to use it, or because it literally can't be turned off aside from an obscure search parameter or using a slur in your search
Everyone thought Google Search would die from AI, but people are searching more than ever.
There's a part of the tech industry that uses what I would call dark influencer techniques. Search is dead. Lidar is too expensive for AVs. LLMs are as scary as thermonuclear bombs. China China China. Without ALPRs you'll get carjacked picking up Tommy from soccer. Some of it is for stock pumping, some for regulatory capture, some is flooding the zone with shit. This kind of "marketing" is part of the reason why tech…
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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 th…
You may be right, but that was not the point. There were many voices who claimed that AI would make Google obsolete.
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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…
Maybe in the future something comparable will be invented and protected. No harm in dreaming a little I guess.
I know for most people that the big surprise here is sustained search ad revenue in the face of AI. But I’m super curious on margins because I thought for sure offering so much free AI inference would be so insanely expensive it harmed margins.
No one is losing money on inference these days. Google's vertical integration means that they have some of the lowest inference costs in the industry in any event.
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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…
Gemini is not reliable whatsoever: https://openrouter.ai/google/gemini-3.1-pro-preview/uptime (the orange chart is either AI studio or Vertex, I suspect AI studio, but it's not good either way). 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/Antigravit…
While the model was "ok" everything else was trash.
Constant 429s or 502s for "reasons".
10 different ways to try and pay for the stupid thing and none of them clear.
My favourite was as a paying customer I could not get it to use the latest model. Sometimes it would but most times it would dump me to 2.5.
All of my experience is exactly the opposite of the gp comment is saying.
The gemini-cli repo is gong show too https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli
In particular, the flow that used to support content creators through Google Search has been damaged. Previously, content would appear in Google Search, visitors would come in, and creators could earn revenue through ads, courses, or other products. But now Google can answer directly through AI Overviews, making it harder for content creators to survive independently.
That said, I think Search is still making a lot of money because Google is effectively focusing less on informational search and more on commercial search. I mean searches with purchasing intent, such as “best laptop recommendation.” We cannot know the full search-volume statistics from the outside, but in my subjective experience, the quality of actual search results is often much worse than expected.
In that sense, Google’s revenue now feels less like it comes from serving small developers or end users, and more like it comes from selling infrastructure to large companies and major developers. The huge increase in Cloud revenue seems especially important. Google appears to be strong in enterprise AI solutions, and as an AI development platform it seems extremely powerful. My impression is that the center of gravity in AI development platforms is shifting somewhat from Microsoft toward Google.
However, revenue growth does not necessarily mean product quality. Since AI is increasingly absorbing informational search, users may end up using Google mainly for commercial-intent searches. From another angle, that gives Google an incentive to tune its algorithms and layout around purchase-intent queries.
Separately from that, there is a sharp contrast between Google as a development platform for companies and Google as a service experienced by end users. From the end-user perspective, the experience feels worse every day. Search feels poorly maintained. Ads also feel poorly controlled; for example, adult ads may appear to teenagers. Outside the Gemini API, the places where users can actually use Gemini feel fragmented, and the web version of Gemini is difficult to use seriously because of strong token limits.
Google seems to be trying very hard to serve developers who build on top of Google. But separately from that, ordinary users of Google services increasingly feel neglected.
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Ads dont need click to be effective.
I don't think I've ever clicked on an ad on purpose
Brand awareness is all that matters. Apple isnt counting on me clicking on the ad to buy the macbook
Still no sign of Waymo in Other Bets revenue, which fell from $450M to $411M. 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.)
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AFAIK this is literally the only time google has laid more than a few thousand off at once
They did it again in 2024 and then switched to continuous drip of small "layoffs" and encouraging attrition. They have tried various layoff flavors: random, strategic, political, voluntary, and now in their continuous microlayoff era good luck distilling a consistent simple explanation for the day to day decisions of many thousands of managers. Google has cost-cut their old hiring and performance management processes…