Google Earning Q1 2024 [pdf] (opens in new tab)

I think that most of the traffic being stolen away is going to be for low value searches. I (and probably almost everyone else) use Google when I already know what I want, ie I’m trying to get to a company’s website to buy a particular thing, but don’t know their url name.

I’m not going to use an LLM to shop for car insurance or look for hotels.

Google Search is a product embedded in the lives of everyone on the planet. I wonder to what extent its growth is a reflection of increasing population and Internet penetration. Even if "competitive knowledge engines" impacted Google Search, the effect would likely be minuscule compared to existing growth trajectories.

Speaking personally, there are some queries where I prefer an LLM. But usually I start with Google, and it's only after 5-10 searches that I get frustrated enough to remember I could just ask ChatGPT instead. So ironically, I actually send more searches to Google than I would have if they gave me the answer on the first one.

I wonder what their search metrics would look like if they removed quick bursts of searches. Presumably, someone searching five times in a row is actually having a bad experience, rather than loving the product so much they came back to it five times in one minute.

I think this is the same thing I feel when I read Meta's earnings. I continue to see growth in usage of their core properties but I don't think my entire circle touches Facebook or even Instagram nearly as much.

Whatsapp certainly isn't driving those ad dollars so it truly is remarkable how disconnected my demographic (loosely using my here) is from the overall world usage.

> essentially everyone in my social circle has moved on from going to Google first for information. I guess our demographic is not predictive of the larger market.

"Google is dead, no one goes there anymore" is one of the most tired takes I see frequently on HN. It's nice to hear someone express the self-awareness to realize that what they see in their immediate circle is not representative of reality.

> everyone in my social circle has moved on from going to Google first for information

Or have they ?

> essentially everyone in my social circle has moved on from going to Google first for information

As you said, you don't know how representative is your social circle. And you may underestimate your Google usage. ChatGPT often isn't a good substitute to Google. Looking at my history, a lot of my Google queries couldn't be answer by ChatGPT. Either because I need precise information, or recent information. Often I use Google just to redirect me to some specific site, typically wikipedia.

If you have a social circle where 100% of your contacts turn to an LLM first, not only have you buried yourself deep in a niche filter bubble, but you have also surrounded yourself with some of the planet's most misinformed people. If I were you, I'd be worried.

This site has always been a bubble.

This might surprise people a lot. In developing countries Google is synonymous with internet. A lot of even young, people have a mental model of the internet as a subset of Google.

First, most lucrative markets like travel, product search etc. are still all on Google. Certain growth in them is coming along with GDP growth.

Second, Google can still be optimizing/increasing no. of ads served.

I played around with the free version of Gemini recently. I gotta say it was quite impressive. On par or even better than the paid version of OpenAI.

Google search's biggest threat is Amazon. People buying stuff search directly on Amazon.

Seems like a situation where it’s worth it to be cognizant of your bubble.

I don’t know exactly what you meant by “our demographic”, but I’m a frequent reader of HN, work in tech, and generally stay up to date with all things tech, and yet… I don’t know if a single person that doesn’t still use Google as their go-to place for information. Before this comment I had never even heard of Perplexity or You.com. /shrug

You still have to verify plausible sounding LLM output somewhere.

> I guess our demographic is not predictive of the larger market.

I think it is, "our demographic" is just a few years ahead of the masses. For example MacBooks started getting popular with programmers way before they got popular with the masses.

It's possible our demographic is just more ahead of the market than you think. There's a lot more quarters left in the future...

I already include site:reddit.com when searching for reviews, but I think that's been getting astroturfed away.

funny you mentioned that because this demographic is the same demographic that predicted the demise of FB (it has grown in orders of magnitudes), hating on Tesla (also has been growing), didn't believe the viability of Dropbox idea.

When you say moved on can you share what you're using when you want/need to buy something online? Understand you moving on for information, but just curious what you're using these days for a specific product.

I think Google still beats the various AI tools for any use case where you need to find a real world thing or decide between real world things. Which are also the primary types of queries that drive advertising revenue for Google. Yeah, ChatGPT has replaced searching Google for stack overflow answers, but it's not like you were clicking on ads when looking for programming answers anyway.

Perplexity especially is absolute garbage for 99% of people and their use cases. Google search is instant, available from every browser window and works with minimal keystrokes. LLM based search is such a bad experience on mobile where verifying the likely nonsense response is even more of an expensive task.

I have never used an LLM for buying intent and those are the valuable queries, AIUI.

Or there is large scale number fudging and fraud.

Just remember no one is auditing what views, likes and clicks count Google and Facebook tell you, you are getting. Advertisers just milk corporations. They dont care if the numbers are fake. They are now trained to tell everyone to spend more or you dont get attention someone else will.

As Goldharber once famously said , about the Attention Economy - people have limited attention to give anything but infinite capacity to receive attention.

No one likes to hear or believe they dont really have any influence when the system is signalling they do. So the ponzi scheme grows larger and larger.

There is a great book about it (from an ex-googler) called the Subprime Attention Crisis.

No one knows what to do about it so everyones head is buried deep in the sand.

We need new attention allocation systems that are not market driven.

I think I am opted into an experiment, but when I use Google search the first results are answers from their own LLM.

https://search.google/

I was asking GPT some question reg a Postgres feature , it gave me the answer with the caveat that it's knowledgebase hadn't been updated in a year.

I went right back to google.

The same kind of people who try alternatives are likely using adblockers, therefore they weren't positively affecting Google's earnings anyway.

The volume of search ads I see increased dramatically since one year ago. Just adding a data point to the discussion.

Also worth noting that ChatGPT, while big in tech circles, most people don't use it day to day.

>I guess our demographic is not predictive of the larger market.

The only thing this demographic is predictive of is its tendency to overestimate its degree of influence.

I want to say I'm joking, but I've unfortunately noticed that a lot of techies are very self-absorbed and detached from the wider world at large.

The layoffs and dividend are related -- the company's death rattle has been shaking a while now. Management is desperate to retain the confidence of the investor class.

With the amount of mindshare, infrastructure and over 90% of the search engine market share that Google has, it will take decades to even begin to challenge Google's market share in search.

We've seen this with Neeva which is now no more. Perplexity appears to be no different and only appeals to techies and at the same time is already dependent on Google search for their results, according to The Information.

In fact I can only see them getting shut down like Neeva or the case of Perplexity likely to be acquired. Amazon looks more of a potential acquirer for Perplexity AI.

I don’t think so. All a startup needs to do is build 50+ data centers around world. Lay thousands of miles of terrestrial and under sea fiber optic cables. And finally build a browser and obtain 80% market share.

not just this - most android smartphones do have google search bar by default, in some it's not trivial to disable it and most ppl are using it. This alone is a huge moat. Add to this a huge nr of chromebooks that children use in schools (and after them too since the OS is familiar) - default search for these is google too. Default ff search engine - google, default iphone search engine - google. Every time someone buys an iphone, google gets one more user automatically. Some may switch, but absolute majority will still use default

Also...10,000 fired... Employees previous equivalent quarter:190,711 and now:180,895

Edit: 190,711 employees on March 31, 2023

Exact same level of authorization in April '22 and '23

Why don't American companies pay dividends? I assume it's not tax efficient to pay dividends in the US?

What an odd statement. Care to explain why you think a routine buyback announcement is important?

At today's closing price this is 3.6% of outstanding shares

Do they mention what price?

"I don't use Facebook!" (goes off to check Instagram account)

I use DuckDuckGo for search, Apple Maps when on my iPhone, and Gnome Maps when on my computers. My main browser is Firefox, but I use Brave (Safari-based) on iOS due to better ad blocking there. I use local markdown files for all of my note taking, and Fastmail for email.

But I am aware that I’m not typical.

I'd guess only a minority.

However, we should also remember that Mozilla's main funder is... Google/Alphabet, via a royalty deal for having Google be the default search engine. See, e.g., here:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-go...

And while the royalties arrangement is not that old, Google was a main funder before that happened as well. FYI.

So far I've replaced Google products with Firefox (even on mobile), Kagi/DDG, Proton Mail, Simple Mobile Tools, my own FTP server, Emby, and F-Droid.

But I also still use Android, the Google Play Store, YouTube (via NewPipe), Google Messages, Google Maps, and Google Keep because I haven't found great alternatives. It's surprisingly hard to completely get rid of Google.

Don't forget.. As of February 2024, there are approximately 3.6 billion Android users worldwide, spread across 190 countries.

Eh, Firefox is blazing fast and readily available. Avoiding ReCaptcha on the other hand...

Leading from behind.

Like this? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/reddit-sneaky-ai-spa...

Injecting ads into the actual search results looks egregious today, but will be the norm later.

In many countries this would be illegal for classic media.

Like this doesnt happen already and hasnt been the case for the last 10 years?

Buybacks are useful for many reasons, but one is that theyre good for people borrowing against their shares. If a lot of people have borrowed against their google shares and now that interest rates are high want to pay back the loan without selling a dividend makes sense.

Lots of other reasons too I think but much of it probably has to do with the change in interest rates.

Signaling that growth will be slower.

They have have been buying back stock for a very long time

Google has $100B+ of cash and is giving out $10B/yr as a dividend. I think they will be able to scrape something together if they have a good idea.

It is $300B/year company growing at 15%. I don't think growth is an issue here

I’m a Googler who doesn’t do anything remotely close to setting capital return policy. Just remember Alphabet has been buying back 10s of billions for a while. Dividends are just a different capital return mechanism.

Dividends were originally the main point of owning corporate stocks in the first place.

They are growing as fast as they can in terms of data center and GPU output. They're supply constrained.

Where would you spend that cash?

They already have >150k employees they can redeploy at will to enter any new market.

It's not like they can make any major acquisitions in this political environment.

Facebook did it, so they will follow.

Yeah, they should spend it making 5 new chat apps.

Funnily enough, Peter Thiel called this years ago.

It helps add stability to the value of the stock, in simple terms. I think it’s good for a company like Google. A bad demo can crash the price 20%. That makes the dividend yield go up, which makes the stock more attractive. Plus, if you hold for years and years and years you get actual income.

It signals they're pandering even more to Wall St.

Does Google monetize searches for code stuff?

This is current position in the US economic cycle imposed by the Fed. High interest rate, low investment. Return to safety.

The only major investment left would be computing infrastructures, but it's severely limited by supply. Even if Google wants to spend more money, simply there's no chips to buy. I don't see any significant future investment opportunities other than Waymo in the foreseeable future, but it seems still far from scaling out.