I'm old enough to remember when a big selling point of Google was that it didn't do this.
"Google (www.google.com) is a pure search engine - no weather, no news feed, no links to sponsors, no ads, no distractions, no portal litter. Nothing but a fast-loading search site. Reward them with a visit."
Search, TV->internet video, newspapers->internet - all of them go through those cycles.
But sometimes the incumbent crushes the revolutionary.
And sometimes the incumbent hires or bribes the revolutionary.
And sometimes the incumbent guts the revolutionary and wears his face as a mask.
Can you imagine a more effective way to incentivise more people to start even more disrupting platforms? Can you image a more effective way to get investors to give money to these upstarts?
It's much easier to get your rabble-rousing startup to threaten disruption (and then be bought up as a precaution), than if you had to actually battle it out in the marketplace to the bitter end.
In Soviet Russia government protects harmful contents from us!
Because I agree, the forced obsession with "growth" at all costs, which seems necessary to operate a public company (at least in this century[1]), is imho the #1 reason why enshittification is unavoidable.
[1] I'd describe nearly all present-day corporations as fixated on quarterly results even at the expense of business viability. Something I truly don't understand is why big companies say, 75 years ago seem to have been so much less that way. If anyone has any theories I'd love to hear them.
Just running Google as-is without ads would have produced less value in the long run. Plus the SEO tide (which relied on DoubleClick ads that weren't yet owned by Google) began to rise and would've drowned Google Search much earlier if they hadn't grown.
Where I think Google took the bad (for consumers) turn was when they purchased DoubleClick and began to consolidate the entire ad business. Instead of losing money to SEO spammers, they began to make money. This put Google into a conflict of interest against their own users. Ever since then they've been piling onto that conflict of interest, draining more and more value from their products.
People overwhelmingly prefer ad-supported to subscription supported. Google would be a dramatically better service if everyone who used it paid. I really, really, cannot overstate that.
The internet sucks because users feel entitled to everything on it for free. They don't want ads and they don't want to pay subscriptions. uBlock origin, archive.is, and constant complaining about how the content sucks.
The internet is full of children with a naive understanding of how things work. The are so deluded that they even call on companies to simply provide them everything for free if they want to be "successful".
The notion that Internet sucks because megacorps have to scrounge for cash doesn't pass the most basic smell test.
Google's promotion guidelines used to include that if you want to get a promotion on a technical track, you have to demonstrate a mastery of complexity. Cue the unnecessary complexity in some projects meant to get the author promoted.
(They might still include that requirement. I don't know. I haven't worked at Google in nearly a decade.)
Eventually you are an organization whose purpose is to return cash to shareholders in the near term.
Hence a page full of ads, and no reason to think things will ever change.
> Eventually you are an organization whose purpose is to return cash to shareholders in the near term.
Amazon's history shows that public shareholders can be very patient with cash being returned to them, or the company ever showing a profit at all. Tesla used to be in the same boat.
Shareholders are very forward looking. They just don't necessarily trust 'visionary managers' not be full of bullshit. Probably rightly so.
I see this constantly repeated in anti-capitalist/anti-corporate rhetoric, but on the other side, shareholder meetings, finance conferences, financial service talks, no one ever wants this. Maybe the 20 year old stock bros on discord pumping penny stocks, but no serious shareholder of any company with a name you might recognize.
It happens, there are cases of it, but overwhelmingly the vibe is "long term stable profit generation".
Look at the recent Microsoft layoffs. They purged the company of so much tech talent, and tanked morale for basically all the remaining workers. From any kind of long term perspective this is madness. Yet they were rewarded for it by the stock market.
I think disrupting large players will be much harder than it was it the past.
Rome used to rule the world; sure it took about a thousand years, but it ultimately didn't last.
They clearly decided to just say "fuck it" though. Sometime after Ruth Porat replaced Patrick Pichette and especially after Sundar took the helm (both happened while I worked there) but most especially in the last 3 years.
I wouldn't necessarily put it that way because not Google, nor any company, has moral capacity. They don't have souls. What they do have are incentive structures, and those flip when the stock goes public.
Pre-IPO: the board is mostly founders and VCs holding paper wealth. Their shares aren't liquid, so the only way they get paid is by making the pie way bigger for some future exit. That means "grow, grow, grow." and that means playing nice with customers.
Post-IPO: the board is legally stuffed with "independent" directors, whose pay comes in RSUs tied to the stock price. Now the shares are instantly tradable, and shareholders who can bail in a quarter want to see results in a quarter. Directors translate that into exec comp, and suddenly management's job is "make the stock go up right now."
Some theorists point out the obvious hack: take away the hot potato. Slow the game down. Make shares harder to flip, make earnings less frequent. If you could only trade stock once a year, you'd actually care what the company looks like in a year. If they only reported results annually, you'd be forced to think in years, not quarters.
Upside: management can focus on products and customers instead of quarterly guidance theater. Downside: investors hate being locked up, and capital gets more expensive because people price in that illiquidity. Transparency drops, execs get more room to bullshit.
It's a tradeoff: you can have maximum liquidity and hyper-efficient capital markets, but then you get short-term brain damage. Or you can slow the game down, but then you're basically asking people to trust managers more and accept worse capital efficiency.
Nobody;s found the perfect middle yet. LTSE[1] tried, dual-class shares are a kludge, and otherwise we just live with the cycle: grow like crazy private, IPO, then spend the rest of your corporate life addicted to quarterly earnings.
Now it's the other way around. The primary source of gains from owing shares is speculation on the share price. Dividends are mostly ignored.
The result of this is that share prices move not on "how well is the company likely to do?" but on "what do we think the share price will do in the next couple of months (at most) [0]?". It all becomes hype and rumour and speculation. Shareholders only care about the price, so boards are incentivised to only care about the price. And so on down. Generating hype about what the company is going to do becomes more important than actually doing it (I exaggerate, but not by much). This then leads to the short-term-ism that we see, and the hot potato effect.
I think the answer would be to tax speculative profits. If you sell something for more than you bought it for, the government takes a cut. Specifically remove this from income tax calculations, because they have way too many loopholes, and make it more like VAT/GST; a tax payable at the point of the transaction. This would reduce the profits from speculation, and hopefully move the emphasis back onto dividends and longer-term thinking.
[0] and obviously, for some privileged traders, the next couple of milliseconds
How would you feel about tax-disadvantaging buybacks?
I like Cory Doctorow's take on this [0], that this is basically defrauding the shareholders. It used to be illegal, it probably should be illegal again.
It's also unsustainable, in that you can only do this for so long before you've bought up all the open shares and there's so few remaining that your company is no longer effectively tradeable.
I don't know where this practice leads, but I don't think it's a place we want to go to. I suspect it'll be further concentration of capital into fewer hands. To the extreme, we end up with all the large companies doing this becoming effectively private, owned by a small group of folks rich enough to keep their holdings while everyone else sells out during the buybacks. That's not good.
They just return money to shareholders. The only material difference with dividends is the tax treatment. Even all the incentives are the same.
> It's also unsustainable, in that you can only do this for so long before you've bought up all the open shares and there's so few remaining that your company is no longer effectively tradeable.
What makes you think so?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_split might blow your mind.
> To the extreme, we end up with all the large companies doing this becoming effectively private, owned by a small group of folks rich enough to keep their holdings while everyone else sells out during the buybacks. That's not good.
You can tell your broker to automatically re-invest dividends for you.
Similarly, if you just don't sell when there's a buyback, you own more of the company afterwards. No one is forced to sell.
Btw, most companies (including Apple and Google) keep issuing shares to employees. Buying back some of them in the open market is just an indirect roundabout way of essentially handing employees cash.
Mr Doctorow's point is that the company is taking money from its operations, which it should be spending on expanding those operations and increasing its value, and spending that money on artificially inflating its share price, by effectively wash trading the shares, creating artificial demand, and artificially reducing supply.
If you bought shares in the company as a long-term position in order to receive dividends then you do not benefit from buybacks, and arguably lose out (because the money used on the buyback could have been distributed as a dividend). It only benefits short-term speculator shareholders. And, of course, the executives who are incentivised on share price, for whom a buyback is a much, much, easier way to get those incentives than actually doing their jobs and using the money to grow the company.
How is any of that fraud? Fraud doesn't just mean you have to disagree with something someone does, but you have to have been lied to.
> And, of course, the executives who are incentivised on share price, for whom a buyback is a much, much, easier way to get those incentives than actually doing their jobs and using the money to grow the company.
Companies can and should adjust the incentives so that the effect of dividends and buybacks are the same for the executive. (They already adjust for share splits for example.)
> If you bought shares in the company as a long-term position in order to receive dividends then you do not benefit from buybacks, and arguably lose out (because the money used on the buyback could have been distributed as a dividend).
Before you buy any shares, you should check what management says about their plans. At least, if you have specific expectations.
Even if buybacks were outlawed, companies aren't guaranteed to pay dividends. It's perfectly legal to never make a profit, or to give all your excess money to charity. You just have to tell your shareholders.
> Mr Doctorow's point is that the company is taking money from its operations, which it should be spending on expanding those operations and increasing its value, and spending that money on artificially inflating its share price, by effectively wash trading the shares, creating artificial demand, and artificially reducing supply.
Yeah, that's a stupid objection.
The substantial first half of it would equally well apply to dividends. (And the whole point of giving money to companies as an investor is that eventually you are getting more back.)
The second half is just not how any of this works. Does he even know what a wash trade is? And what's 'artificial' about this?
This is like listening to RFK talk about medicine.
Their only material difference is in taxes. Yes, I am in favour of putting dividends and buy backs on the same tax footing, just in the name of simplicity. And while you are at it, also put dividends and interest payments on the same tax footing.
At the moment, many jurisdictions advantage interest payments, thus encourage financing companies with debt instead of equity. And then they awkwardly pair it with other rules that try to tell companies (especially financial companies like banks) not to use so much debt, not to be so levered.
Google's original founders still hold the majority of voting rights.
Making trading less efficient wouldn't change anything here.
> It's a tradeoff: you can have maximum liquidity and hyper-efficient capital markets, but then you get short-term brain damage. Or you can slow the game down, but then you're basically asking people to trust managers more and accept worse capital efficiency.
No, your proposal wouldn't work at all.
A big problem is actually that most managers in most companies mostly work for themselves. It's called a 'principal/agent problem'.
Exactly as you say 'execs get more room to bullshit.'
Btw, there's private equity funds with very long capital lock-ups. Their effects on companies typically aren't loved by the people who voice similar concerns to yours.
In any case, good luck designing your system in such a way that's (A) not trivial to bypass, and (B) doesn't gut the economy.
As a customer (and worker and investor) you have to vote with your feet and wallet to show the market what you want and don't want in your companies.
For many years they were very profitable, with great search results and good quality ads.
It seems the only things certain in this industry are death, tax, ads, and graphics cards.
This was the venture funding "we're a startup era". And Google succeeded eventually.
But in that era making money didn't matter. It was just about grabbing market space. And oh boy did they succeed.
But all bills become due eventually. Stock holders start demanding continuing increasing profit and that eventually leads to the downfall of any good product.
Don't blame ordinary shareholders here! The original founders still hold a majority of decision making power (I think via super voting shares).
2000, launched ads: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Ads
2001, profitable: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2001/aug/08/internetn...
They still do have it.
Going public gave Google a lot of nearly-free money to grow, and it's how you've gotten both Gmail and Google+. But more importantly, it allowed them to offer much higher total comp packages by issuing more stock on the go. I think they're prisoners of the stock market only insofar that if the stock stops going up, they're gonna have a harder time hiring and retaining talent.
In a way, it's the employees holding the company hostage. They're simultaneously complaining about innocence lost and stating their implicit preference for this outcome by demanding top-of-the-line comp.
If you want to be paid the same as at Microsoft or Facebook, you become Microsoft or Facebook.
Gmail launched in April 2004, and the company went public in August 2004, so what you said is not literally true.
> and Google+
Thanks for the chuckle.
If you innovate manically, you get Google Wave and Google+ amongst good products.
(However, this doesn't work in the other direction: having a few duds doesn't prove that you are innovative.)
And in retrospect, was that really a good thing? Short-term, yes - I remember how much better it was than the alternatives. Long-term, we ended up in a situation where email = GMail for most users, and this in turn gives Google undue leverage and strangles competition.
Edit: I stand corrected. Ads were added later, but when first introduced they were clearly marked. I got my history wrong.
I'd have to dredge it up but someone put up a site that showed the visual changes to ads over the past 15 years, and they've become more and more indistinguishable from organic search results, and they've taken over more of the page.
A great visual history of enshittification, and also how "growth at all costs" capitalism leads to that enshittification. Google was still taking in money hand over fist in the mid 00s when they had a few, clearly marked ads, but capitalism demands the line arcs upwards no matter what.
Google was quite vocal about clearly marking ads, in contrast to Overture, Yahoo, and others who mixed ads into search results in the late 90s / early 2000s. I think the period when Google lightened, then entirely removed the colored background that made it easy to identify ads was an inflection point in their fall from being a company that genuinely focused on users towards becoming just another megacorp run by profit-maximizing MBAs.
If you like Brian Eno it engaged his curiosity also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_07003:_Bell_Studies_fo...
If, back then, Yahoo and Altavista were minimalist and Google was a garish nightmare of ads and flashing gifs and nested banners and affiliate buttons, I would still have happily used it for the results.
Google's search interface is still reasonably clean IMO. Nowhere near its minimal best. Yes there are ads and "sponsored results" and shopping frames and all that crap, but they really aren't everything that's wrong with Google Search.
Quality of results and inability to specify queries beyond vague suggestions are the worst things.
I would have put up with slow bloated adware Google results of early 2000s, compared to fast minimal sleek interface with results of Yahoo/Altavista/anything else I tried.
There were lots of "differentiators" that did not really matter, including speed. The differentiator was result quality, not how or when they were presented.
It was a big contrast and a signal of classy goodwill, back in the age of replicating popups and garish blinking text.
However, the lean interface without blinkentags and ads was definitely a selling point. Also, IIRC, the guarantee that you'd only get sites that actually contained all the words in your search query (that feature is long gone, too, of course).
The interface and speed were great, no doubt. Did you ever encounter another search engine that produced similar or better results that you otherwise would have used, but Google's interface sold you? I never did, so it wasn't a selling point for me.
> ..."we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."
- "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine", Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page[1]
They weren't wrong!
They basically had this big money dial, and rather than crank it to 11, they were fiercely protective of the core user experience.
They kept ads mostly to the side (unobtrusive), only served them on queries where there was a high probability of commercial intent, and only promoted ads above organic results if the predicted CTR was extremely high.
I remember being delighted more than once when the ad system surfaced the product I wanted when organic results did not.
Now…? You get all spam above the fold.
The Ads Quality PM back then was Nick Fox, who I just learned became SVP for ads and search last year. Which means he is at least indirectly responsible for the OP. Not entirely sure what to make of that.
I'm fucking livid. Well actually: mildly unimpressed. The cool kids rarely last as such and "do no evil" ended up behind a green tent and a single shot was heard.
Actually, I am slightly stressed over this whole thing.
Google should be fearful for how easy it was to replace them entirely with Kagi, and how little I miss it.
That was 2020. Six months ago, I find out she is still using it and its a "bit slow". I update it from 18.04 to 24.04 via ssh over an OpenVPN connection on the box itself. Its still in use and is still attached to both one of my home OpenVPN servers and my work Mesh Central.
I've also recently repurposed another Win10 but can't do Win11 laptop to someone so they can do some courses.
I think I'm doing all right with supporting the next cool kids.
I'm still stressing though 8)
"The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users... advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."
— The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998