Earlier quoted context omitted.
AFAIK this is literally the only time google has laid more than a few thousand off at once
Only if you count a single day. If you count yearly Google has not stopped layoffs of "more than a few thousand" since 2023. And I bet some months get above 1000. The big layoff in 2023 was not actually the first time by the way, that was much earlier (there was a wave of office consolidation in the 2010s). Also the 2023 layoff was at least 3 distinct waves. And constant layoffs very much have the result on morale yo…
Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results
91–100 of 136 posts
Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results
#92In the long run, judging from recent incidents such as YouTube monetization suspensions, I do not think Google is good for the consumer web experience or for content creators. I also think SEO search has almost completely broken down. 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 crea…
This isnt a Google issue. Users are asking for it - ChatGPT and Perplexity did it first and it'd be crazy for Google not to do that.
You could argue Google being late to LLMs were a good thing, and once they were forced to play the game, they played
Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results
#9312 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…
Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results
#94In the long run, judging from recent incidents such as YouTube monetization suspensions, I do not think Google is good for the consumer web experience or for content creators. I also think SEO search has almost completely broken down. 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 crea…
> 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. This isnt a Google issue. Users are asking for it - ChatGPT and Perplexity did it first and it'd be crazy for Google not to do that. You could argue…
Suppose an electricity utility builds the power grid, and many businesses build their operations around that grid. Then later, the utility uses its privileged position in the grid to directly replace the businesses that depended on it. Would that be morally acceptable? It may be correct from a business perspective, but that does not automatically make it good for the whole ecosystem.
In a capitalist society, companies are pressured to create new cash cows, enter adjacent markets, and even perform self-disruptive innovation in the interest of shareholders. This may be one such case. But whether that benefits the overall ecosystem is a separate question.
Users want free content. Users want services without ads. Users want fast summaries. Users want answers without reading the original source.
Those desires are natural. But if producers cannot remain sustainable under those desires, then the long-term quality of information may collapse.
Google can preserve revenue through AI Overviews, while creators may lose revenue. The problem is that AI Overviews occupy a large container near the top of the results page and hide or push down the sources users would otherwise visit. In other words, the UX design emphasizes Google’s AI answer while making external sites less visible.
It is true that content creators now have to compete with Google’s AI Overview. But this competition is asymmetric.
From the company’s perspective, and from the shareholder perspective, Google’s decision may be correct. They are far smarter than I am. But it is still unclear whether Google will remain unharmed if the ecosystem that feeds it is gradually destroyed.
Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can anyone explain how search revenue is still _growing_ in the age of LLMs?
I have been wondering the same thing myself. I manage google ads for a living and I don't understand why I still have a job. Personally I use AI chatbots to help me make every purchase decision I have to think about.
I just tried asking ChatGPT where to buy a backpack I'm looking for and it just... did a search. It would have been considerably faster to just do the search myself instead of wade through the slop about how "This backpack is hard to find in stock, you'll need to buy it directly from the brand yada yada yada".
Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results
#96Google 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?
Another way to think about this is that LLM based search actually grows the entire pie for search and so multiple players can all be growing at the same time.
The real losers are publishers, blogs, forums etc. Instead of traffic going to them that traffic is being turned into more search queries and more LLM responses.
Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results
#97Earlier 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…
Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually no, LLMs (preferably tool-using LLMs that can themselves do web searches and price lookups) are a great way to shop, especially if you're looking in a category and don't know exactly what item you want. You just say "I want to find some headphones" and it makes you some recommendations. Or it helps you nail down what you're looking for first and then gives you options at various price points. I've found this…
In my example there are no search engines. And if there were why would they allow tool calls?
Search engines do exist, and search engines do allow tool calls. Try find an AI chat provider that doesn't connect web search to the agent.
Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is absolute nonsense. You are mangling a well defined term of producer surplus that is widely accepted in economics with your own.
Can you explain more?
Normally, in an Econ 101 supply/demand model, you have an upward-sloping supply curve indicating how many units of some commodity a producer is willing to sell at a given hypothetical price, and you have a downward-sloping demand curve indicating how many units of some commodity a consumer is willing to buy at a given hypothetical price, and the point at which they meet is called the "market clearing price" where supply and demand are in balance. The area above the supply curve and below the market-clearing price is called the "producer surplus" [1], the amount of extra money the producer gets from the gains of trade. Very roughly, you can think of it as operating profit, though it's not quite the same thing because operating profit is a real tangible dollar amount while the supply curve is largely a hypothetical.
The way Google works is that it comes in for each individual transaction and effectively tells the advertiser "So you have a product or service that you'd like to sell? How much is it worth to you?" It runs a second-price VCG auction [2][3] to determine which of the available ads are shown to the user. Why second-price? Because an ordinary first-price auction incentivizes users to bid less than their true willingness to pay, because they know that if they win the bid, they will have overpaid. Same issue as buyer's remorse in real estate transactions: you know that if you won the bid, it was because nobody else thought the house was worth as much as you did. With a VCG auction you're only paying the marginal harm to the next bidder of winning the auction, so you have an incentive to bid your true valuation. And this is why I used the term "producer surplus" in the original post: it's to capture how Google effectively elicits from each advertiser the maximum amount that the transaction is worth to them, which if they're bidding rationally is the difference between their reservation price and the price they'll receive from the transaction, i.e. the producer surplus.
This also demonstrates where I've been playing fast and loose with the terminology. The price a VCG auction participant pays is not actually their bid, it's the marginal harm caused to other participants (basically the sum of all bids except the advertiser, minus the sum of bids of the other winners). But in a fairly competitive market, one with multiple producers who all face roughly the same cost structure, you'd expect that this quantity converges to the advertiser's actual bid, leading to a condition where Google has actually captured the entire producer surplus and maximized its revenue.
[1] https://www.intelligenteconomist.com/producer-surplus/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey%E2%80%93Clarke%E2%80%9...
[3] Technically, it's a modified VCG auction, because the actual ranking score is a machine-learned function that also includes factors like "What's the likelihood the user is going to click on this ad?", "Is this ad spam or malware or illegal?", and "Is there brand damage to us from highlighting this ad?" But from an economics perspective, the only important part is that it's a second-price auction.
Re: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results
#10022% 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…