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Comment by hgomersall | Hacker News Reader

Search died ages ago [1]. Ads dying is a direct consequence of that.

[1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

> Search died ages ago

You might want to let Google know that, because the number of searches on Google appears to continue to be growing massively:

https://searchengineland.com/google-5-trillion-searches-per-...

Those numbers look like the exact opposite of dead or dying to me. As does Google's growing stock price over the same time period.

‘Numbers go up’ is the exact type of thinking that caused the death of search.

From a user perspective, google search results are awful and almost always a complete waste of time.

Again, this "death of search" I hear so much about, but doesn't exist in the numbers.

If search results are such a waste of time, why do people keep using Google? In ever-increasing numbers? What's the explanation there?

Dead internet theory explains this perfectly well.

Google search results are a wasteland of ads and content farms, with vanishingly small value for humans

Again, then why are people using Google more than ever?

I don't really see how "dead internet theory" explains that. If it were as bad as you claim, surely usage would be plummeting? But it's just the opposite.

Are you sure it’s _people_ driving this increase?

Dead internet theory means real users are declining while bot users are skyrocketing.

For example google search is such a terrible experience these days that I’ll often ask an LLM instead.

That LLM may do multiple google and other searches on my behalf, combine, collate and present me with just the information I am looking for, bypassing the search experience entirely.

This is a fundamentally different use case from human traffic.

> Are you sure it’s _people_ driving this increase?

Most likely - yes. If Google has been dead for years people wouldn't pour hundreds of billions of dollars into ads there. The Search revenue keeps increasing, even since ChatGPT showed up. It might stagnate soon or even decrease a bit - but "death" ? The numbers don't back this up. One blog saying he stops paying for Google ads conflicts with the reality of around 200 billion yearly revenue from Search.

Exactly this. Businesses decide whether to pay for ads based on clickthru rates and conversions. Bots don't click through. They don't convert. If these rates fall, advertisers will pay proportionally less as their max bid, and Search ads revenue will fall substantially.

That hasn't happened. Google continues to grow with real users.

You get what you measure.

It does not follow that people making more searches means people are having more successful searches. If google found the exact thing you were looking for and put it top centre in the results, would the number of human searchers stay the same but the number of human searches drop?

The design of Chrome is such that people use Google search instead of entering the tld.

The policy described in my link is literally about making each user search more to get the results they want in order to drive more ad revenue. That would create more searches and a less good user experience.

That is good evidence that Google is dying because it takes more than one search query to find what you want.

You should let Google know, given their business is really humming nowadays. Along with their stock price.

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