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But Google seems to be doing decently well compared to blekko and Watson?

That it is, but a more apt comparison would be Duck Duck Go which was a contemporary of Blekko and definitely out performed relative to Blekko's success. DDG still going strong and even buying TV ads, so yeah.

That said, how Blekko and Watson ended up squandering good technology in search of something else is also an interesting learning experience/tale.

I agree with everything you are saying, but the stock price is up 6x over the last 10 years and revenue is still growing 13% a year so nobody at google is going to listen to any of this.

Basically ad dollars have continued to transition from old media to digital media over the last decade+ and that mass migration has created enough revenue to cover up all of Google's core problems.

The reality is that this firehose of money is what allowed those core problems to grow & fester. That and the practice of using TVCs for as much as possible, to the point where nearly every process that's documented is outsourced, and often no one inside really understands how things work anymore.

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