The Mediocrity of Modern Google
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I don't want conversational AI interfaces. I like search.
If I lose that because it's a losing model, then so be it. But I don't see the point in telling Google to follow somebody else's trend.
They suck in so many ways, but this doesn't add to it. I find this kind of "what have you done for me lately" just a little weird. They have done zillions of crappy things and a dozen earth shaking ones. If the next earth shaking one comes from someone else I don't see any point in waggling my finger at Google over it.
Link are good for search. Where wherever algo leads you to data that may have information you are looking for.
On the other hand, if I just want the answer to a specific question, then links, that we tolerated for so long are bad. They are bad because once presented I now I have to dig and sort through the data to find the answer. It will nearly always be in a different format than the last and take away mental stamina that could be applied to the actual task I am trying to accomplish.
Google, if they stick to links, will continue to be a good search company. The problem is people don’t and did not actually want to search, they simply wanted answers. And thus this is why the entire industry of search will probably go away.
Google is going to have to make a decision. Continue to be search, a product in which demand is dwindling, or be in the business is providing answers.
Google understands that people want answers, and thus why they implemented answers.
A big problem for Google is I don’t think their revenue model works well with actual answers. Nobody cares about going to the site any more. In fact I am sure there were many talks internally at Google limiting what sort of answers they do provide that would result in less clicks on links.
Ad driven search as we know it is dead. For pay chat bots have a good chance of replacing ad driven speech.
SEO is effectively dead with AI chat system, thus again putting googles future in jeopardy.
Googles executives need to decide if they are going to be blockbuster, Redbox or Netflix, time is running out.
It is mostly SEO spam, written by LLMs anyway. At that point I prefer the summary from Google.
I am not defending the model, but it is just the reality right now.
- Learning that they had 100K+ employees
- Seeing resumes from people who had spent 5+ years at Google and had a project list with what I would expect from <1 year at a hedge fund or <3 years at a bank
- Learning about the "I want to just serve 5 Terabytes" video/story [0]
- Hiring people away from Google who were, for example, network engineers who turned out to be great SREs with good programming skills
- They just kill off greats apps that people enjoy with little to no notice (granted, keeping stuff around forever ala AWS is its own issue)
In other words, they became a big corporate behemoth and lost a lot of their "spark". Which is sad b/c I remember the early days of using Google search, Google maps etc where it felt like we were all living in the future.
Sure, they are breaking ground in the AI space but 100% agree that it feels like they are on the downward trajectory.
(although other firms have been here and come back so let's see...)
> Gemini 2.5 barely made a ripple in the broader tech conversation.
But my sense (vibes from using it) is it's the very best model right now (though I have not tried the $200 a month exclusive openai offerings)
Google seems to have understood how important a long context length is and what I absolutely love about AI Studio is that it shows how many tokens you've consumed, so that you know that you should start wrapping it up and move to a new chat.
I still use Claude for code but for any general reasoning questions, or even just for Socratic dialogue purposes, Gemini has really blown me away.
It is hard to imagine any LLM being so much better that it is worth going from $0 to $200.
(I'm not saying I don't agree with the complaints.)
1: https://developers.google.com/maps/coverage#countryregion-co...
2: https://support.google.com/mapcontentpartners/answer/144284#...
The monopolization by modern Google is more like it. They're not competitive because they don't have to be.
I just can't work out the economic logic of that. It seems to be then that there are secondary considerations, such as market domination, that provide the value in these transactions. I'm not sure how this argues against my point.
> a large company has the resources and clout to turn a borderline business into a good one
I can't determine why a search and advertising company thought it had the requisite skills to run an ISP or to make it a competitive and profitable business.
> even if it's a large company as sclerotic as Google.
The evidence here is that they failed anyways.
Startups are often unprofitable despite having a good product. Large companies have an easy time of making good products profitable, but a difficult time in developing good products from scratch.
> It seems to be then that there are secondary considerations, such as market domination, that provide the value in these transactions.
Undoubtedly! But a profitable startup that is dominating a market would not be acquired for a small amount of money (or at all).
> I can't determine why a search and advertising company thought it had the requisite skills to run an ISP or to make it a competitive and profitable business.
Google makes the majority of its money on ads. That being said, it's absolutely brainless to ignore YouTube, Waymo, Pixel, Cloud, etc., etc. when talking about Google's business. All of these would be unicorns if they were independent companies.
There are lots of reasons a company can be unprofitable. Just having a "good product" does not mean there is a "market demand" for the product.
> Large companies have an easy time of making good products profitable, but a difficult time in developing good products from scratch.
You accidentally have made my point for me again. Why should this at all be the case? What natural economic factors lead to this outcome?
> that is dominating a market would not be acquired for a small amount of money
You could also just compete with them. Market domination is one of the factors in determining if an illegal monopoly exists.
> Google makes the majority of its money on ads.
So owning platforms that deliver ads is an important part of market lock up.
> brainless to ignore YouTube, Waymo, Pixel, Cloud,
All things that deliver ads or gather user data for the purposes of advertising, yes?
> All of these would be unicorns if they were independent companies.
With the exception of their cloud.. they all used to be independent companies.
That there are attributable reasons for the outcome is not interesting, why this illegal outcome is not prosecuted is.
Economies of scale. That's it. The overhead per employee is much, much smaller in a big company, it's much easier to acquire more labor/investment, and there's much more stability for planning.
This is a GOOD THING. This is how we enjoy cheap goods and services. It's all well and good to crow about small business, but actually dealing with small businesses frankly sucks as a consumer.
> You could also just compete with them. Market domination is one of the factors in determining if an illegal monopoly exists.
Google Search dominates the market mostly because it's better than all the other competitors. iPhones dominate the market (at least in the US) because people prefer them. Not all monopolies are the result of illegal behavior, and not all monopolies are equal.
Market dominance is necessary but not sufficient to call a monopoly illegal.
> So owning platforms that deliver ads is an important part of market lock up.
If you criteria is "all platforms which could deliver ads" then Google not only doesn't have the market locked up, they're incredibly far from it.
> All things that deliver ads or gather user data for the purposes of advertising, yes?
I don't know about you, but I find that I go to YouTube to watch videos, call Waymo to physically go from point A to point B, use my phone to make calls and browse, and use Cloud for my compute needs.
Just because a product COULD be used to deliver ads does not mean that's what it's for. It's nuts to try and see the world that way and I cannot even begin to understand why you would want to.
> With the exception of their cloud.. they all used to be independent companies.
Dude, no. Waymo, Pixel, Cloud, Photos, and Search are homegrown. YouTube was an acquisition - but comparing how much work has been done post-acquisition vs pre-acquisition it might as well also have been 100% in-house.
Your facts are seriously wrong here. Google is not acquiring finished businesses and extracting all the profit they can from them, PE-style; they're actually creating value.
> That there are attributable reasons for the outcome is not interesting, why this illegal outcome is not prosecuted is.
There are definitely things Google does which are illegal, like that Apple default search deal!
By and large, though, the company is wildly profitable because it offers services which its users find useful.
Although they may have been slow to publicly launch anything worthwile in AI, Gemini 2.5 Pro is SOTA.
I mean: AI is the hot topic atm ang Google arrived and are already owning everybody on many metrics.
I wouldn't discount yet a company which powers 70% of the world's smartphones and which knows how runs millions of servers.
They just proved with Gemini 2.5 Pro that the old dog can still learn a new trick. And then teach some to other dogs.