Comment by kace91

Comment by kace91 2 hours ago

>Google could have been an advertising company with a search engine. I'm glad they aren't.

They kind of are though?

Like, there is indeed amazing research supported by the company. The core user facing products are really declining in quality by being user hostile.

A search right now results in a made up LLM output followed by 4 ads disguised as content, and then maybe followed by the wanted result.

I’m not sure what happens inside the company for those two things to be true at once.

state_less an hour ago

>>Google could have been an advertising company with a search engine. I'm glad they aren't.

>They kind of are though?

Splitting[1] is a psychological phenomena that you'll find often once you learn to recognize it. Google can both be doing great research, and run a significant influence operation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)

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smurda 2 hours ago

In 2024, 78% of Alphabet’s revenue came from ads (72% in Q3 2025).

Ads subsidize experimentation of loss-generating moonshots until they mature into good businesses, or die.

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ACCount37 2 hours ago

A big part of what makes Google Search awful is just the usual SEO shitters, trying their hardest to rig the game on any search result that's anywhere close to common or profitable.

Google's main failing there is that they don't put enough effort into their search to keep up with that, and fail to raise the bar on garbage content and search engine manipulation.

LLM output in search results I'm not against. Do you need to open an entire website to learn how to sort an array in JavaScript with a lambda function? For many of the more common and more trivial requests, LLM output is well in "good enough".

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theappsecguy 5 minutes ago

Well by not opening the blog post or whatever page that nicely explains the JavaScript sort with examples, you just deprived them of page views and probably income. So what will happen in 5 years when you’re searching for human written and thoughtful content on something more complex and all you get is slop?

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echelon an hour ago

A big part of what makes Google awful is that they are a monopoly across multiple domains. They have used extremely anticompetitive tactics, and the regulatory bodies have been asleep at the wheel.
Google owns search, the internet browser, and every point of ingress for the average person.
They transformed the URL bar into a search bar as a way to intercept everyone's thought process and turn it into the largest internet tax in the world.
Brands that spend millions or billions to establish themselves now have to competitively bid on their own established trademarks, because anyone can swoop in and put ads in front.
Google designed the results page such that the top results are what 99% of people click on. Google search is effectively an internet toll on every business.
They own the browsers, they own the HTML spec, they control the web.
To think this doesn't increase costs for consumers dramatically is absurd. This is a tax on all of us.
Not only do they do that, but they also starve informational businesses and news businesses of traffic by stealing their content and showing visitors first. The people that work to build the content are getting stiffed.
Google has tried so many times to kill websites and bring the entire Internet under their control. There was a time when not having a Google-controlled AMP website meant you didn't rank at all. Your content lived in their walled garden. Then Google coerced you to bear their network's ads.
Google has destroyed businesses and entire careers by being allowed to do this.
Don't get me started on mobile. While it's a duopoly, both market participants are subjecting all commerce and all participants to the same Gestapo regime. Everything is taxed, tightly regulated, and kept under thumb. The two titans constantly grab more surface area. I could spend an hour outlining the evils here too.
Google needs to be broken up. Not as one would expect into multiple business divisions (though this would also be wise), but instead into multiple copies of the same business that are forced to compete and stripped of certain business tactics.
This is what we did for Ma Bell. Google is way worse.

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- fancyfredbot an hour ago
  
  In mobile I have been upset by the way AOSP is being deprioritised by Google and the fact they've increasingly moved features into Google play services.
  In the browser space I'm pleased that Firefox exists but they are so dependent on Google that they barely qualify as competitors.
  In the search space though, competition is heating up for the first time. LLMs are a good alternative to a web search for many types of questions and Google is far from the only player here. Open AI, Anthropic, etc are competitors to Google. They are competing with Google in a way which Yahoo and Bing never really managed.
  Anyway I do very much agree that Google enjoys multiple monopolies and that they shouldn't. My point is that with so much easy money out there it's refreshing to see them continuing to innovate. They don't really need to.
  
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dasil003 2 hours ago

No we don’t need to open an entire website to learn x simple thing. However we DO need meaningful competition among information providers. I am not looking forward to the enshittification phase of AI.

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