A few days ago a Google found me something I was searching for, but via ads and not search. In the middle of searching raw part numbers, the ad became 100% relevant. It was a weird experience clicking on the ad; something I never ever do. Yardinflatables.com if you're curious.
So if I understand it, search numbers are down (because AI is doing what Sam Altman originally saw - AI is a better search engine)
And Google knows it, so why not squeeze the current customers, whatever model AI takes it’s unlikely to be a word matching auction, this model is dead, grab the cash and go.
Search numbers are down because Google search has become crap.
I know a lot of people which I don't consider tech enthusiasts and they moved from Google to duckduckgo.
Unless if you have deterministic/hard-coded logic in the harness (or during the training of 'search LLM') that prioritizes certain sources over other results.
Text search (like how we traditionally think of search) is fundamentally a deterministic problem, and squeezing it through a non-deterministic, stochastic engine is inefficient from a first-principles algorithm design pov.
“Recently”?? Have people not seen the findings of the AdTech Antitrust lawsuit they lost? Y’all should google it (heheh) especially the ad auction rigging parts of it, including Project Bernanke.
What they’re doing now is just being a lot more overt about it, because they want to carve up their old cash cow to feed their AI ambitions before ChatGPT and Claude eat it up first.
I (and a non trivial number of people I knok) have switched to Kagi for search just to avoid having to deal with the bullshit that is the above the fold google search results.
Course, they win anyway because I also pay for youtube premium to avoid seeing ads..
Feels like the world is becoming a split between people who can afford not to be the product and people who cannot.
They can't juice, because advertisers are now good in calculating conversion rate, roas, cpa, etc, so they would shift budgets to other channels like overnight if see Google underperforming.
There's a reason why GSP (Generalized Second Price) auctions are called "truthful auctions", and that's because they elicit the true value as the bid from the advertiser (in theory).
So (in theory) advertisers will lower their bids if they're not getting the desired value from the clicks; and over time some will migrate budgets to other channels (like "influencers"? shudder ...).
Of course the big spenders on Google with the multi-million dollars advertising budgets won't just change their spending behaviour over night. That takes time - like anything in big corporations.
what channel actually provides most of these ad buys that would satisfy their ad dollars?
Google has been sued for being a monopoly, and it's not because they're just really good. It's because there's basically no other market that hits any of the dollar costs.
Wow, that X post is the most succinct but persuasive and damning thing I've read about Google's ad business developments in years (I don't watch it particularly closely.) Thanks!
Gotta love seeing the complaint calling out "exact match (close variant)". Google sure does love text embeddings because it massively increases the keyword-search matches for auctions. After all these years, they definitely have no intention of fixing it for the advertisers.
Random anecdotes like this don't equate to "company juicing their numbers". You need much stronger evidence than that to make such an assertion. There are legal and financial ramifications for lying, companies are audited, there are official forms and documents that public companies must file. Of course a company can lie on those forms, but in the case of a company like Google you need extraordinary, factual evidence to make claims like "they've been juicing their numbers".
You basically have to say, everyone from the CEO/CFO, to the auditors, the financial analysts, the legal team, and all the way down are all lying and this random guy on Twitter is telling the truth. Sorry, not buying it.
See the replies to that tweet. I agree, one swallow does not a spring make; but here there's a pattern. Ask anybody who does search advertising, and you'll hear the same story too many times for it to just be a coincidence.
Most people don't know this, but the Search Advertising auction is a black box. The advertiser just specifies a bid (the maximum they're willing to pay for a click); and the search engine promises that they will not pay more than that.
Here's a trick that Search Engines may (or may not, I plead the Fifth) use: the price an advertiser "i" who bid "bid_i" pays is bid_(i+1) * pctr_(i+1) / pctr_i where "pctr_(i+1)" is the predicted probability of click on the next lower ad; "pctr_i" is the predicted probability of click on the current ad.
Guess who calculates the pCTR? The Engine! In theory, if their pCTR calculations were 100% accurate, all advertisers would pay the minimum bid (which is typically $0.01)! Clearly, this is not desirable. So Engines juice the revenue by tweaking these pCTR values. Talk to anybody who works on auction mechanisms at a search engine, and you'll hear stories of how they tweaked these pCTR values.
In this context it's being used as tantamount to lying. "Juicing the numbers" implies that something is being misrepresented which is a form of lying.
Yes I read the post (please refer to HN guidelines on asking if people read something) and didn't find anything worthwhile there which is why I mentioned what I did.
Posting here for others asking about lying/juicing since I'm rate limited.
~~~~~
Lying on financial statements is in fact illegal. Juicing implies that some number is being misrepresented as higher than it otherwise would be which is a form of lying and thus would be illegal.
Obviously there are some gray areas - "we changed how we measure this" or something along those lines can be considered "juicing" or just a matter of changing a calculation to make more sense, but the broad accusation is extraordinary and requires much more evidence than some random person on Twitter saying some things. As an investor in Google (individually and through ETFs) it has no bearing on any investment thesis I have because I don't care what random nobodies on the Internet say and neither should you.
Their earnings missed by almost 30%, which is pretty huge in the stock market.
I think the bigger concern is that earnings misses are very rare for GOOG, and historically they've been able to hit almost any target that Wall Street expects. Their past earnings misses were all related to major macroeconomic events (2020Q1, which was the COVID shutdowns, 2022 all year with inflation from COVID/Ukraine + rate hikes, and 2019Q3 with the taper tantrum from Fed rate hikes), and most of them were more in the 5% range. A 30% miss, particularly with slowing revenue growth in their core business despite almost full monetization of commercial queries, could indicate that the golden goose is disintegrating.
For that matter, GOOG has been extremely correlated with macroeconomic indicators since about 2018, which means investors in the rest of the stock market should probably watch out. It's likely we're already in recession but don't know it.
OI isn’t more “actual” than EPS. I remember back when Yahoo traded for less than cash and liquids [1] because investors didn’t trust management not to blow it on stupid shit.
am i remembering correctly that "google cloud" in the earnings isn't just developer's google cloud bills (that's google cloud platform), it's also basically any product where a consumer or enterprise pays money to google for anything other than advertising - google drive storage, gemini pro, enterprise google workspace plans...
Not quite. Google Cloud is GCP, Workspace and Gemini Enterprise. Consumer products subscriptions like Youtube premium, Google storage and even Gemini (consumer) fall under "Google subscriptions", which is part of Google Services
> basically any product where a consumer or enterprise pays money to google for anything other than advertising
Not exactly - the consumer stuff (subscriptions and devices) falls under services, while cloud covers GCP, Workspace, and enterprise-specific cloud services (like maps etc).
Basically if you pay for it with a monthly sub on a personal google account (including Gemini stuff like Ai pro) it's services.
Others want to nitpick but generally yes, before we had AI, the last craze was cloud, so they shuffled things around to the point that everything was "cloud". This is also how Oracle got to be the biggest "cloud" in the world!
Google really had developed only 2 good products(not including acquisitions such as YouTube): search and gmail. Their primary cow to milk has been search. The rest (I.e cloud compute) is not really a moat.
I think we are facing a revolution/rotation where the these companies may start to become just “old businesses”(I.e IBM, AOL).
I don't really agree: it's pretty simplistic to boil Google's history down to two products developed 20 years ago.
I'm not really sure why you say that cloud compute isn't a moat. It's an enormous investment to compete there; there's a reason even large companies buy compute from GCP/Azure/AWS or even if they have their own compute don't attempt to compete. Additionally, GCP has been an enormously successful 'bet' for Google over the past decade.
Google has also turned subscription revenue for their various services into a major revenue stream; it'd be hard to call those various services (Google Drive, Google Play, etc.) anything other than successful.
Chrome doesn't generate revenue by itself, but it certainly drives advertising revenue across the rest of Google's portfolio and was developed in-house.
Finally, it's pretty strange to credit the success of YouTube as a revenue stream with a small loss-making company that was acquired in 2006 rather than Google, who has run it for the past 20 years.
> GCP has been an enormously successful 'bet' for Google over the past decade.
I disagree on this. It's not clear how much money they are actually making and how much revenues are shifted over from other business lines to GCP because GCP earnings growth is / was valued higher than other business lines by the markets.
I mean, $11B in quarterly operating income ($33B in revenue) is clearly quite a lot. The only reasonable argument here is that this includes hardware sales (i.e. TPUs), but it is still a lot even if you subtract that. I think many folks internalized the narrative that GCP was an also-ran many years ago (when that was demonstrably true), but haven't updated their priors now that revenue is almost the same as (and may soon surpass) Azure's.
I’m sure with Chrome,
Google has smart people calculating the value of the data that they get from it. It doesn’t make money directly but it’s gotta be a huge money maker.
Chrome logs every site you visit with the mothership, and that is very valuable data to Google. That allows them to spot, in realtime, trending sites for example. They see what the users are doing on the Internet in realtime and act accordingly.
It’s 2026, I would absolutely say Google “Developed” Google Maps and Android even if they did not “create” it originally. At what point can we attribute the success of these products to Google as a developer instead of Google the buyer.
Android had a market share of 0, with no released products when they bought it. The 80%+ market share today was all Google.
Google Maps was purchased (pre Google IPO), but the original (“Where2”) was a desktop application. Google completed rebuilt it alongside the acquisition of other data sources, and released the web page. Years later, they built a mobile app which became one of the biggest apps of all time. Should we not attribute that success to Google instead of the Australian startup building a desktop app?
Look I'm Google's #1 hater but this is just goofy lol. There are multiple buildings full of Android developers, and have been for at least a decade; to say that it's not "made" by them is a huge stretch. Technically all of their products are just ripoffs of Sun & Xerox, right? Or Turing & Church, I suppose!
When YouTube was acquired by Google, it was already pretty similar in shape as a product to what it is now. The biggest differences are scale, the addition of advertising, and ancillary integration with other Google services. The first is a function of growth, the second is exactly what Google would be expected to do to monetize the service, and the third is another logical implication of "acquisition". (You could quibble and say they added vertical shorts and live video, but I don't think those are even fundamentally different from a product perspective from what YouTube was already doing in 2006, just fast-forwarded to adapt to the consumer technology we have today).
That's very different from Android, which was an unreleased prototype that had zero users and was dramatically different even from what ended up shipping as the first product, let alone what it is today. Android at acquisition would be unrecognizable from what the majority of people worldwide are typing on this very minute.
Why separate out products developed internally versus acquired and growth? There is an almost moralistic element in the tone of “well they just bought it”. Sure, they bought it and grew it into a behemoth, plus what really matters is not the provenance but how much money it makes for them. Plus, it’s reasonable to call YouTube (and instagram, which also gets the same treatment) two of the all time best corporate acquisitions. It’s not easy to buy a company and grow it like that.
Not a moat and not big but... for SMEs "Google Workspace" is a godsend from outter space.
This is what allow little SMEs to not have to suffer that piece of shit that Windows is. I know people running their SMEs (and I helped them set up Google Workspace) from Mac and Chromebooks since years and years and who do not ever want to here again from anything Microsoft.
They're basically doing everything inside "Google Workspace" (formerly "G Suite", formerly "Google apps for domain" because Google's product naming is just confusing).
Gemini is also IMO excellent for everything that is not coding. It's really rare that I use Anthropic models (which I pay a subscription for) for anything else than coding.
GMail / Drive / Google Docs / Google Spreadsheets are great for a shitload of SMEs out there who want to give Windows and Office the middle finger.
> Gemini is also IMO excellent for everything that is not coding. It's really rare that I use Anthropic models (which I pay a subscription for) for anything else than coding.
I use Gemini Pro for every day stuff and Opus is much better than it. A lot more features and everything works better, especially in the websites. Gemini is just... dumber overall. I had a project/gem (now replaced by a skill) and sometimes I'd start with them and then veer of course along the way. Gemini would religiously follow the initial context, stupidly, while Opus realized that a good chunk if it wasn't needed anymore after my last prompt and did the right thing.
It's absurd to say that Google did not develop YouTube. They acquired it at a point where it was a galaxy-scale cash incinerator and made it work economically using their superior platform.
When Google bought YouTube, it already had Google Video. Google saw that YouTube had market traction and pivoted quickly, to its (and YouTube's) credit.
Difference is, TV had (has) content in 30 minute chunks. But Youtube has, among others, Shorts, which are often 30 seconds. But still Neal Mohan wants to show ads on Shorts.
On top of these ads, creators are inserting their own ads ("this video is sponsored by ...."), so it's ads all the way down (like turtles).
Before they acquired these, how were they doing? I'll give you a hint: they weren't exactly how we knew them today. Android was literally a concept and YouTube was bleeding money with no realistic path to profitability.
> Everything they make from within flops 99% of the time.
As do all inventions? Of course, you just don't hear about all the failings from individuals or smaller companies that went bust as a result. The important thing is the 1% that succeed are so successful it offsets the losses.
those geniuses that made acq. grow all have big retirement exit btw. Nobody in google worth low digit NW if they have been there for +10Y, so yeah they bet on their work and beat market for several years
That’s nonsense. What about Maps, Sheets, Android, Meet, Chrome, Cloud etc. I don’t even know how you can exclude YouTube. It’s basically something they’ve worked on for more than a decade at this point. The number of google products we all use on a daily basis is pretty stunning.
I don't think the question of "good products" is really relevant here; the important aspect is profitable products. And in that arena, nothing beats the money printer!
They used to have a second minimint in AdSense et. al. ("Display Advertising"), but that shrinks by the year economy-wide as the vicious cycle of data tracking, ad blocking, and paywall dodging continues. Now it's a mere $7B[1], compared to $11B for Youtube (technically also Display Advertising but it gets its own segment now, I guess) and $63B from the money printer proper.
[1] Actual report here: https://s206.q4cdn.com/479360582/files/doc_financials/2026/q... Interestingly, display revenues are slightly up! But still, in Google land, "slightly up" is potentially a scandalous failure. Perhaps they settled into better agreements with big publishers ("sell side") after it became clear that they wouldn't actually be punished for having a Display Ads monopoly, despite losing the antitrust case brought by Biden's DoJ.
For me Google has stayed as the default interface, if I need to ask a basic query (probably searches that don't yield much revenue but keeps me on Google), the results were becoming worse a 1-3 years ago but now the AI parts of Google is now good-enough(TM) that I mostly don't need to go to a separate interface, as long as users aren't fleeing they can probably continue to get paid for ADs (also the if YT ads are included, those have really become obnoxious but probably well monetized).
Not more than accidentally or when actually interested in something that pops up, but as a friend said, I'm not a usual core customer so I've never been the baseline.
The thing they're doing correctly right now imho, is that AI mode is mostly toggled for things that passes a quick questions filter (probably low probability of a purchase, like "global illumination methods" giving a decent overview of the field) while if you just type green shoes it'll put out an assortment of online and local shopping options.
Now if as someone said in the sibling comments, Google is gouging their customers with the new auction model that's another problem, but if I was a shareholder I'd be less worried about an exodus of end users to OpenAI,etc than I was a year ago.
How would you expect search forecasts to be met if most of the time you get "are you a robot" or clanker summaries if you are lucky.
Search no longer works and you are killing your most important product with AI that nobody wants. If search worked like in 2010, no one would use AI answers.
Retail is just a bad business. The ad business is many times more profitable than cloud business because of the margins. Cloud isn’t a money printer when compared to advertising.
There's nothing intrinsic about Google search that makes it a monopoly. Monopolies usually hold their position because regulations make it prohibitive for competitors to form or because they control a rare resource. Google search does neither of these two things. Its just a better product compared to everything else out there and the market reflects that.
You forgot to exclude the "not usual" factors that allow monopolies to hold their position to rule Google out of the group.
For example, non-regulatory attempts at blocking of competitors, which Google does engage in due to their dominant position in mobile (of course, that's also just another better product)
Monopolies hold because companies engage in foul play to hold their monopolies. When Google goes out and pays Apple billions to default to Google Search, that is not a regulatory hurdle, nor is Google using its position as the Android platform maintainer and bundling Google Search with Play Services.
I'm really torn between these two perspectives. You are not wrong about monopolies. And yet, when Google and Apple struck that deal I thought, thank god I will not be forced into using whatever Apple has to offer up as a search product.
"Search" is a borderline obsolete concept. There is no separation between search, AI, information retrieval, knowledge synthesis, information tasks, etc.
Gemini is terrible, it's trash especially after downgrading to the free version. I have to prompt it two to three times for it to understand what I am asking it. It seemed better when I was paying for it while it's free competitor models (the other 4) always answer me right away.
you're not really the ideal customer. They're probably going to market to enterprise people because Claude/ChatGPT will become too expensive when they IPO and won't have any other revenue stream unlike Google/MS.
A few days ago a Google found me something I was searching for, but via ads and not search. In the middle of searching raw part numbers, the ad became 100% relevant. It was a weird experience clicking on the ad; something I never ever do. Yardinflatables.com if you're curious.
So if I understand it, search numbers are down (because AI is doing what Sam Altman originally saw - AI is a better search engine)
And Google knows it, so why not squeeze the current customers, whatever model AI takes it’s unlikely to be a word matching auction, this model is dead, grab the cash and go.
search numbers are down as a percentage of total revenue, because cloud is up. search numbers are not actually down
Search numbers are down because Google search has become crap. I know a lot of people which I don't consider tech enthusiasts and they moved from Google to duckduckgo.
I have moved to Kagi myself
> search numbers are down
Source?
Google Search & other revenue grew 12% YoY in Q3 [1]. In that time paid clicks grew 8% and cost per click 4%.
Across the Google Network impressions fell 14%, with cost-per-impressions growing 14%. (9% of revenue.) But that’s on the web, not search.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/0001...
Google has been trying to drop "Network" impressions (by moving them to Google owned properties) for close to two decades now.
The only revenue covered by Network is what it pays out to newspapers and other kinds of ad-supported websites.
The article says
Search revenue still grew: the share fell because the rest of Alphabet grew faster.
AI doesn't really replace search engines, it's just a UX layer on top.
> this model is dead, grab the cash and go.
[citations needed]
[delayed]
AI can definitely be a more natural experience for search, but it doesn't return better search results.
Unless if you have deterministic/hard-coded logic in the harness (or during the training of 'search LLM') that prioritizes certain sources over other results.
Text search (like how we traditionally think of search) is fundamentally a deterministic problem, and squeezing it through a non-deterministic, stochastic engine is inefficient from a first-principles algorithm design pov.
I have started to use the interactive Google summary chat, it's nice to have that initial search result context to follow up on with more questions
Yep, that's it. Search results are just such a bad example. AI just convinces you -falsely- it's results are good.
Somewhat impressive that search share of revenue is 5% down, but search revenue is 12% up..
They have been juicing their numbers recently .... https://x.com/MaxAnderson/status/2080229375773941871
“Recently”?? Have people not seen the findings of the AdTech Antitrust lawsuit they lost? Y’all should google it (heheh) especially the ad auction rigging parts of it, including Project Bernanke.
What they’re doing now is just being a lot more overt about it, because they want to carve up their old cash cow to feed their AI ambitions before ChatGPT and Claude eat it up first.
I (and a non trivial number of people I knok) have switched to Kagi for search just to avoid having to deal with the bullshit that is the above the fold google search results.
Course, they win anyway because I also pay for youtube premium to avoid seeing ads..
Feels like the world is becoming a split between people who can afford not to be the product and people who cannot.
https://xxcancel.com/MaxAnderson/status/2080229375773941871
They can't juice, because advertisers are now good in calculating conversion rate, roas, cpa, etc, so they would shift budgets to other channels like overnight if see Google underperforming.
There's a reason why GSP (Generalized Second Price) auctions are called "truthful auctions", and that's because they elicit the true value as the bid from the advertiser (in theory).
So (in theory) advertisers will lower their bids if they're not getting the desired value from the clicks; and over time some will migrate budgets to other channels (like "influencers"? shudder ...).
(Doesn’t change the point of your comment, but doesn’t Google use first-price auctions now?)
Of course the big spenders on Google with the multi-million dollars advertising budgets won't just change their spending behaviour over night. That takes time - like anything in big corporations.
Big spenders already do not bid on google directly, but balance budgets automatically between multiple platforms and channels base on performance
what channel actually provides most of these ad buys that would satisfy their ad dollars?
Google has been sued for being a monopoly, and it's not because they're just really good. It's because there's basically no other market that hits any of the dollar costs.
> what channel actually provides most of these ad buys that would satisfy their ad dollars?
advertisers decide which channel justifies.
They still bring 250B ads dollars to google search, meaning it provides more than 250B value to them,
so no.
meta earns lots of money too
What other channels? The alternative on search is Bing and it's a tiny market. Then there's display which is total dog shit.
Ads is highly fragmented market, google has yt, display, mobile ads, there are tons of other platforms (meta, linkedin) where you can advertise.
That first price auction complain is bs, advertisers will just stop bidding $5 for top click and start bidding $1.1 in his example to hit their goals.
If this is true how is it not fraud or just regular old theft?
You should submit this as its own story. This is big if true, so they say (and based on the replies, it is true).
can confirm; ive started getting advertisements explicitly meant for dentists
im very far from dentistry
Wow, that X post is the most succinct but persuasive and damning thing I've read about Google's ad business developments in years (I don't watch it particularly closely.) Thanks!
Gotta love seeing the complaint calling out "exact match (close variant)". Google sure does love text embeddings because it massively increases the keyword-search matches for auctions. After all these years, they definitely have no intention of fixing it for the advertisers.
Random anecdotes like this don't equate to "company juicing their numbers". You need much stronger evidence than that to make such an assertion. There are legal and financial ramifications for lying, companies are audited, there are official forms and documents that public companies must file. Of course a company can lie on those forms, but in the case of a company like Google you need extraordinary, factual evidence to make claims like "they've been juicing their numbers".
You basically have to say, everyone from the CEO/CFO, to the auditors, the financial analysts, the legal team, and all the way down are all lying and this random guy on Twitter is telling the truth. Sorry, not buying it.
See the replies to that tweet. I agree, one swallow does not a spring make; but here there's a pattern. Ask anybody who does search advertising, and you'll hear the same story too many times for it to just be a coincidence.
Most people don't know this, but the Search Advertising auction is a black box. The advertiser just specifies a bid (the maximum they're willing to pay for a click); and the search engine promises that they will not pay more than that.
Here's a trick that Search Engines may (or may not, I plead the Fifth) use: the price an advertiser "i" who bid "bid_i" pays is bid_(i+1) * pctr_(i+1) / pctr_i where "pctr_(i+1)" is the predicted probability of click on the next lower ad; "pctr_i" is the predicted probability of click on the current ad.
Guess who calculates the pCTR? The Engine! In theory, if their pCTR calculations were 100% accurate, all advertisers would pay the minimum bid (which is typically $0.01)! Clearly, this is not desirable. So Engines juice the revenue by tweaking these pCTR values. Talk to anybody who works on auction mechanisms at a search engine, and you'll hear stories of how they tweaked these pCTR values.
> See the replies to that tweet
Social media replies regularly confirm all kinds of nonsense.
No one in Google is lying. If what the person in the Twitter post says is true, then everyone at Google is telling the truth, and so is OP.
And given all the replies to that post on Twitter, it sounds like it's true.
I don’t interpret “juicing” to imply illegal.
Juicing is not the same as lying. Did you read the post?
In this context it's being used as tantamount to lying. "Juicing the numbers" implies that something is being misrepresented which is a form of lying.
Yes I read the post (please refer to HN guidelines on asking if people read something) and didn't find anything worthwhile there which is why I mentioned what I did.
Posting here for others asking about lying/juicing since I'm rate limited.
~~~~~
Lying on financial statements is in fact illegal. Juicing implies that some number is being misrepresented as higher than it otherwise would be which is a form of lying and thus would be illegal.
Obviously there are some gray areas - "we changed how we measure this" or something along those lines can be considered "juicing" or just a matter of changing a calculation to make more sense, but the broad accusation is extraordinary and requires much more evidence than some random person on Twitter saying some things. As an investor in Google (individually and through ETFs) it has no bearing on any investment thesis I have because I don't care what random nobodies on the Internet say and neither should you.
While not negative, it seems that their total revenue and EPS was still lower than forecast, hence GOOG stock being down 15% today.
Their earnings missed by almost 30%, which is pretty huge in the stock market.
I think the bigger concern is that earnings misses are very rare for GOOG, and historically they've been able to hit almost any target that Wall Street expects. Their past earnings misses were all related to major macroeconomic events (2020Q1, which was the COVID shutdowns, 2022 all year with inflation from COVID/Ukraine + rate hikes, and 2019Q3 with the taper tantrum from Fed rate hikes), and most of them were more in the 5% range. A 30% miss, particularly with slowing revenue growth in their core business despite almost full monetization of commercial queries, could indicate that the golden goose is disintegrating.
For that matter, GOOG has been extremely correlated with macroeconomic indicators since about 2018, which means investors in the rest of the stock market should probably watch out. It's likely we're already in recession but don't know it.
> Their earnings missed by almost 30%
which exactly earning number missed by 30%?..
Earnings per share. Analyst expectations were for $3.01 and it came in at $2.12.
Ok, this one happened because they invested into AI hardware build out. Actual operating income grew 30%+ q/q.
> Actual operating income grew 30%+ q/q
OI isn’t more “actual” than EPS. I remember back when Yahoo traded for less than cash and liquids [1] because investors didn’t trust management not to blow it on stupid shit.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/business/dealbook/how-to-...
google still highly profitable, so operation income indicates how healthy is business, and eps/net income indicates how agressively they reinvesting.
So replacing actual organic search results with hallucinating AI summaries reduced profitability? Oh no!
So do you think this will be the continue trends of Google's search engine will be less portion of the company's revenue?
am i remembering correctly that "google cloud" in the earnings isn't just developer's google cloud bills (that's google cloud platform), it's also basically any product where a consumer or enterprise pays money to google for anything other than advertising - google drive storage, gemini pro, enterprise google workspace plans...
Not quite. Google Cloud is GCP, Workspace and Gemini Enterprise. Consumer products subscriptions like Youtube premium, Google storage and even Gemini (consumer) fall under "Google subscriptions", which is part of Google Services
> basically any product where a consumer or enterprise pays money to google for anything other than advertising
Not exactly - the consumer stuff (subscriptions and devices) falls under services, while cloud covers GCP, Workspace, and enterprise-specific cloud services (like maps etc).
Basically if you pay for it with a monthly sub on a personal google account (including Gemini stuff like Ai pro) it's services.
[0]https://abc.xyz/investor/faqs-and-general-information/
no, services is broken out separately.
Others want to nitpick but generally yes, before we had AI, the last craze was cloud, so they shuffled things around to the point that everything was "cloud". This is also how Oracle got to be the biggest "cloud" in the world!
Workspace is under cloud but consumer stuff like Google 1 plans have their own line item.
Isn't this good news because they're diversifying their streams?
Google really had developed only 2 good products(not including acquisitions such as YouTube): search and gmail. Their primary cow to milk has been search. The rest (I.e cloud compute) is not really a moat. I think we are facing a revolution/rotation where the these companies may start to become just “old businesses”(I.e IBM, AOL).
I don't really agree: it's pretty simplistic to boil Google's history down to two products developed 20 years ago.
I'm not really sure why you say that cloud compute isn't a moat. It's an enormous investment to compete there; there's a reason even large companies buy compute from GCP/Azure/AWS or even if they have their own compute don't attempt to compete. Additionally, GCP has been an enormously successful 'bet' for Google over the past decade.
Google has also turned subscription revenue for their various services into a major revenue stream; it'd be hard to call those various services (Google Drive, Google Play, etc.) anything other than successful.
Chrome doesn't generate revenue by itself, but it certainly drives advertising revenue across the rest of Google's portfolio and was developed in-house.
Finally, it's pretty strange to credit the success of YouTube as a revenue stream with a small loss-making company that was acquired in 2006 rather than Google, who has run it for the past 20 years.
> GCP has been an enormously successful 'bet' for Google over the past decade.
I disagree on this. It's not clear how much money they are actually making and how much revenues are shifted over from other business lines to GCP because GCP earnings growth is / was valued higher than other business lines by the markets.
I mean, $11B in quarterly operating income ($33B in revenue) is clearly quite a lot. The only reasonable argument here is that this includes hardware sales (i.e. TPUs), but it is still a lot even if you subtract that. I think many folks internalized the narrative that GCP was an also-ran many years ago (when that was demonstrably true), but haven't updated their priors now that revenue is almost the same as (and may soon surpass) Azure's.
Android, Maps and Chrome I use it almost daily for years. Dont know if are great at revenue, but are great products for me :)
To be fair, the parent is excluding acquisitions:
> not including acquisitions
Of which only Chrome is in-house created. I wouldn't think Chrome brings in a lot of revenue, and these days I'd argue FF is a much better product.
As a FF user, I've had to fall back to Edge/Chrome many times because some obscure hospital telehealth portal or bank website or whatever has issues.
I want FF to be successful, but unfortunately it's not really up to Mozilla
I’m sure with Chrome, Google has smart people calculating the value of the data that they get from it. It doesn’t make money directly but it’s gotta be a huge money maker.
Chrome logs every site you visit with the mothership, and that is very valuable data to Google. That allows them to spot, in realtime, trending sites for example. They see what the users are doing on the Internet in realtime and act accordingly.
I wouldn't call Chrome an acquisition, but it wasn't birthed at Google.
He specified "developed."
Google didn't create Android or Maps. Android was made in 2003 by other people. Maps was Keyhole and something made in Australia.
I don't know enough about Chrome to say.
It’s 2026, I would absolutely say Google “Developed” Google Maps and Android even if they did not “create” it originally. At what point can we attribute the success of these products to Google as a developer instead of Google the buyer.
Android had a market share of 0, with no released products when they bought it. The 80%+ market share today was all Google.
Google Maps was purchased (pre Google IPO), but the original (“Where2”) was a desktop application. Google completed rebuilt it alongside the acquisition of other data sources, and released the web page. Years later, they built a mobile app which became one of the biggest apps of all time. Should we not attribute that success to Google instead of the Australian startup building a desktop app?
While Android is technically an acquisition, it was an unreleased prototype when they bought it.
It's safe to say Google brought Android to the level it is now.
Same with YouTube
When YouTube was acquired by Google, it was already pretty similar in shape as a product to what it is now. The biggest differences are scale, the addition of advertising, and ancillary integration with other Google services. The first is a function of growth, the second is exactly what Google would be expected to do to monetize the service, and the third is another logical implication of "acquisition". (You could quibble and say they added vertical shorts and live video, but I don't think those are even fundamentally different from a product perspective from what YouTube was already doing in 2006, just fast-forwarded to adapt to the consumer technology we have today).
That's very different from Android, which was an unreleased prototype that had zero users and was dramatically different even from what ended up shipping as the first product, let alone what it is today. Android at acquisition would be unrecognizable from what the majority of people worldwide are typing on this very minute.
Android, Inc was 100% a Google acquisition from 2005. I thought this was a well known fact?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29...
I... yes, I know. But see the entirety of my comment above, I guess?
To clarify in good faith: what percentage of Android development do you think went on before 2005 in, let's say, mythical man months. 5%? 1%? Less?
Why separate out products developed internally versus acquired and growth? There is an almost moralistic element in the tone of “well they just bought it”. Sure, they bought it and grew it into a behemoth, plus what really matters is not the provenance but how much money it makes for them. Plus, it’s reasonable to call YouTube (and instagram, which also gets the same treatment) two of the all time best corporate acquisitions. It’s not easy to buy a company and grow it like that.
Working with GCP for 6 month now; AWS, with its own weird concepts, is superior. True enterprise.
As a simple example, a week ago we had the GCP outage in UK, their status page said all was good.
Google Pixel / Android are very popular. Chromebooks also did well.
What is Pixel's marketshare, for developed markets? Despite a decade+ of competing, have they made any significant dent in iPhone's share?
Pixels are good, if you replace Google's OS by Graphene that is.
Not a moat and not big but... for SMEs "Google Workspace" is a godsend from outter space.
This is what allow little SMEs to not have to suffer that piece of shit that Windows is. I know people running their SMEs (and I helped them set up Google Workspace) from Mac and Chromebooks since years and years and who do not ever want to here again from anything Microsoft.
They're basically doing everything inside "Google Workspace" (formerly "G Suite", formerly "Google apps for domain" because Google's product naming is just confusing).
Gemini is also IMO excellent for everything that is not coding. It's really rare that I use Anthropic models (which I pay a subscription for) for anything else than coding.
GMail / Drive / Google Docs / Google Spreadsheets are great for a shitload of SMEs out there who want to give Windows and Office the middle finger.
By SME do you mean subject matter expert or Small-Medium sized enterprise?
I could make this make sense either way
Businesses.
> Gemini is also IMO excellent for everything that is not coding. It's really rare that I use Anthropic models (which I pay a subscription for) for anything else than coding.
I use Gemini Pro for every day stuff and Opus is much better than it. A lot more features and everything works better, especially in the websites. Gemini is just... dumber overall. I had a project/gem (now replaced by a skill) and sometimes I'd start with them and then veer of course along the way. Gemini would religiously follow the initial context, stupidly, while Opus realized that a good chunk if it wasn't needed anymore after my last prompt and did the right thing.
It's absurd to say that Google did not develop YouTube. They acquired it at a point where it was a galaxy-scale cash incinerator and made it work economically using their superior platform.
Yeah. I was going to say. I really dislike Google, but what they did with YouTube (whose acquisition I saw as a mistake at the time) is impressive.
aka waited for cost of storage, bandwidth, compute to come down below revenue from advertising.
As it would have done naturally either way
Only if revenue grew quickly enough.
When Google bought YouTube, it already had Google Video. Google saw that YouTube had market traction and pivoted quickly, to its (and YouTube's) credit.
Don't worry, they've put an Advertising guy in charge of Youtube, and he's busy inserting as many ads as possible into each and every video...
People still don't see where this is going.
TV had both 15-20 minute of ad breaks every hour AND product placement during actual content.
That's where we're going in about 10-15 years.
> People still don't see where this is going.
At least 30% of Americans use an ad blocker.
Difference is, TV had (has) content in 30 minute chunks. But Youtube has, among others, Shorts, which are often 30 seconds. But still Neal Mohan wants to show ads on Shorts.
On top of these ads, creators are inserting their own ads ("this video is sponsored by ...."), so it's ads all the way down (like turtles).
Google doesn't pay for transit. Their private glass was the whole reason the acquisition worked.
And putting cache nodes in residential ISPs and exchanges all over the world.
Shhh just let the Googlers believe they’re elite super geniuses when all they do is acquire successful tech like Android, YouTube, and on and on.
Everything they make from within flops 99% of the time.
>Android, YouTube
Before they acquired these, how were they doing? I'll give you a hint: they weren't exactly how we knew them today. Android was literally a concept and YouTube was bleeding money with no realistic path to profitability.
> Everything they make from within flops 99% of the time.
As do all inventions? Of course, you just don't hear about all the failings from individuals or smaller companies that went bust as a result. The important thing is the 1% that succeed are so successful it offsets the losses.
those geniuses that made acq. grow all have big retirement exit btw. Nobody in google worth low digit NW if they have been there for +10Y, so yeah they bet on their work and beat market for several years
That’s nonsense. What about Maps, Sheets, Android, Meet, Chrome, Cloud etc. I don’t even know how you can exclude YouTube. It’s basically something they’ve worked on for more than a decade at this point. The number of google products we all use on a daily basis is pretty stunning.
I don't think the question of "good products" is really relevant here; the important aspect is profitable products. And in that arena, nothing beats the money printer!
They used to have a second minimint in AdSense et. al. ("Display Advertising"), but that shrinks by the year economy-wide as the vicious cycle of data tracking, ad blocking, and paywall dodging continues. Now it's a mere $7B[1], compared to $11B for Youtube (technically also Display Advertising but it gets its own segment now, I guess) and $63B from the money printer proper.
[1] Actual report here: https://s206.q4cdn.com/479360582/files/doc_financials/2026/q... Interestingly, display revenues are slightly up! But still, in Google land, "slightly up" is potentially a scandalous failure. Perhaps they settled into better agreements with big publishers ("sell side") after it became clear that they wouldn't actually be punished for having a Display Ads monopoly, despite losing the antitrust case brought by Biden's DoJ.
:(
Yeah, diversifying into supporting the Gaza genocide.
https://www.democracynow.org/2026/10/29/sofia_liguori_google...
Google cloud could've been more if they didn't drop the ball.
Related:
Alphabet Announces Third Quarter 2026 Results [pdf]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50280197
Pretty remarkable (in the age of AI) that search/ad revenue actually grew 12%. Anyone have a rational explanation why is that the case?
For me Google has stayed as the default interface, if I need to ask a basic query (probably searches that don't yield much revenue but keeps me on Google), the results were becoming worse a 1-3 years ago but now the AI parts of Google is now good-enough(TM) that I mostly don't need to go to a separate interface, as long as users aren't fleeing they can probably continue to get paid for ADs (also the if YT ads are included, those have really become obnoxious but probably well monetized).
But you are not clicking on ads? And they aren't (yet?) in AI overviews?
Not more than accidentally or when actually interested in something that pops up, but as a friend said, I'm not a usual core customer so I've never been the baseline.
The thing they're doing correctly right now imho, is that AI mode is mostly toggled for things that passes a quick questions filter (probably low probability of a purchase, like "global illumination methods" giving a decent overview of the field) while if you just type green shoes it'll put out an assortment of online and local shopping options.
Now if as someone said in the sibling comments, Google is gouging their customers with the new auction model that's another problem, but if I was a shareholder I'd be less worried about an exodus of end users to OpenAI,etc than I was a year ago.
> that search/ad revenue actually grew 12%
it grew compared to q3 2025, but it is flat (0% grows) compared to q2 2026.
I saw a post on X saying Google changed the ad auction pricing model, but I don’t know much about this to comment if it’s accurate.
This post? https://x.com/MaxAnderson/status/2080229375773941871
Thanks, this does make sense.
Where is AI in this?
Search was $63.4B "Everything else" was $64.2B, out of which GCP was $30.7B
Is AI on the 33.5B remaining post GCP? or within the 30.7 of GCP?
AI revenue is folded into both search and cloud, depending on what exactly it is.
How would you expect search forecasts to be met if most of the time you get "are you a robot" or clanker summaries if you are lucky.
Search no longer works and you are killing your most important product with AI that nobody wants. If search worked like in 2010, no one would use AI answers.
Cloud computing is really a money printer right now. Amazon makes more from AWS than from their retail business, it's nearly 2/3rds of their profit.
I mean that's been the case for like a decade (maybe not 2/3rds but AWS eclipses amazon.com long ago)
Retail is just a bad business. The ad business is many times more profitable than cloud business because of the margins. Cloud isn’t a money printer when compared to advertising.
Great, now they won't mind so much when we break Search out of Alphabet, because it's a monopoly... :D
There's nothing intrinsic about Google search that makes it a monopoly. Monopolies usually hold their position because regulations make it prohibitive for competitors to form or because they control a rare resource. Google search does neither of these two things. Its just a better product compared to everything else out there and the market reflects that.
You forgot to exclude the "not usual" factors that allow monopolies to hold their position to rule Google out of the group.
For example, non-regulatory attempts at blocking of competitors, which Google does engage in due to their dominant position in mobile (of course, that's also just another better product)
You can't legally make a crawler to compete with Google anymore, it's explicitly stated in a lot of robots.txt's.
Monopolies hold because companies engage in foul play to hold their monopolies. When Google goes out and pays Apple billions to default to Google Search, that is not a regulatory hurdle, nor is Google using its position as the Android platform maintainer and bundling Google Search with Play Services.
I'm really torn between these two perspectives. You are not wrong about monopolies. And yet, when Google and Apple struck that deal I thought, thank god I will not be forced into using whatever Apple has to offer up as a search product.
The query logs and “permission” to crawl are both advantages vs startups.
A rational take, prepare to get downvoted to oblivion!
"Search" is a borderline obsolete concept. There is no separation between search, AI, information retrieval, knowledge synthesis, information tasks, etc.
Gemini is terrible, it's trash especially after downgrading to the free version. I have to prompt it two to three times for it to understand what I am asking it. It seemed better when I was paying for it while it's free competitor models (the other 4) always answer me right away.
AFAIK only gemini can retrieve youtube videos (chatgpt free cannot and claude IIRC cannot, plus claude do not have native video processing).
So if you need tl;dw or something to do with YouTube video, gemini is the most seamless
They can just fine (well, probably not the "ChatGPT free" interface, that thing can not do anything). It might just not go through a Google API.
Also, of course, before anyone even realized the game was on at Google, Anthropic and OpenAI already downloaded the entirety of YouTube.
you're not really the ideal customer. They're probably going to market to enterprise people because Claude/ChatGPT will become too expensive when they IPO and won't have any other revenue stream unlike Google/MS.
ding ding ding, I cannot see right now anyone else "winning" AI... I hope for a local future where this doesn't happen but otherwise... yeah