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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

Search is not the golden goose. Ads are. If search was the golden goose, they wouldn't be trying so hard to replace it with AI.

Just because Google used to do search as their main point of business does not mean that holds true today. Holding on to the false premise will only add to your confusion about their decisions.

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Ads in Search make up a significant percentage of their revenue. It is also the gateway that gets people into the Google ecosystem.

Ads make the money, but Search is still the consumer facing product that brings people to Google and keeps them there. It’s so ubiquitous people don’t even think about it or notice it anymore.

I’m always surprised by how much people are still searching for stuff as we’ve moved from the open web to various platforms (Amazon, TikTok, Facebook, etc), but every time I see Google’s revenue breakdown I’m shocked by just how important Search still is to their business.

This is from 2024, but shows Search accounting for nearly 57% of revenue. Yes, this is made possible by the AdWords business, but without Search, that 57% goes away, unless that traffic goes to a 3rd party that is also using AdWords and Google were to make the same from 3rd party ads as 1st party. I find that doubtful.

https://www.doofinder.com/en/statistics/google-revenue-break...

> It’s so ubiquitous people don’t even think about it or notice it anymore.

Which is kind of the scary hazard for Google. They made people notice search by their announcements. They drew attention to the thing people took for granted as just how things work. People suddenly have a reason to look critically at it. Google has to hope to god the attention they receive back is actually positive.

  > but Search is still the consumer facing product that brings people to Google and keeps them there.

And let's not forget, these are the same people that when searching for "eBay" will put an ad at the top of the results, linking to eBay, and then place eBay as the top search result.

I've found it hilarious that every single search engine does the same thing. You can do it even in Apple's App Store too. (Not seeing the scam I'm talking about? Search a few more times, it'll hit) How does anyone see this as anything but a scam? User clicks the ad? Get paid. User clicks the search result? No pay. Either way, the user gets the same experience. But why the fuck should any company pay for an ad when the user explicitly searched for their product? It's metric hacking. I mean what's their next move? Down rank the explicit result? When making more money requires degrading the product you know we've fucked up

Not sure this is better, but if they don’t pay, most of the first page will instead point to random unrelated competitors and the search result will become visually harder to find. It is basically legalized mafia tactics (“you’ve got a nice business, shame if something were to happen to it if you don’t pay up”) since supposedly you could pay someone else to SEO the site and achieve the same result without just buying ads

You're exactly right that this is mafia tactics. Clearly people are buying into it to

It would be a shame if someone else got the top result

  >> When making more money requires degrading the product you know we've fucked up

It’s basically a guaranteed way to get your term into the first rank. When people run a simple keyword search without intending to visit the site itself, for example when eBay is caught in a scandal and you’re curious, you type “eBay” expecting a news link somewhere on the first page. That and mafia-esque protection money basically

A lot of big tech behaviour, is very much like mafia behaviour. I always use that description, when people asks me what cloudflare does or how the spam network works. They sell both the problem and the solution and the most unfilterable spam always comes from those aggressively filtering legitimate stuff out (Gmail, Outlook).

This is not done by the search engine - eBay purposely bids to be the top ad for the search term “eBay”. It’s called cannibalization. They’re more willing to pay for the impression and potential click through than they are willing to give up the ad space to a competitor.

See my comment sidethread. It's nice when the facts you assert to support your position are, you know, true.

eBay was an example from the parent, insert whatever brand you want. It’s still called cannibalization and it’s something companies have stopped doing because they don’t see great results

  > This is not done by the search engine - eBay purposely bids

Bullshit. The bidding doesn't happen without the search engine. It is the choice in the search engine design, and how it incorporates bidding that creates the issue. The bidding can't exist without the search engine, but the search engine can exist without the bidding.

> And let's not forget, these are the same people that when searching for "eBay" will put an ad at the top of the results, linking to eBay, and then place eBay as the top search result.

Do you see an ad when you search for ebay? I don't.

eBay stopped paying for placement on the term "ebay" more than a decade ago, and I believe the executive who made that call got a bonus. It's possible of course that they changed their mind later, but since there still isn't an ad on the term today, I suspect they didn't.

(Methodology: I opened Microsoft Edge, where I have no addons or adblocking or anything installed, went to google.com, and searched for "ebay". There are no ads in the results panel. There is a sidebar with some non-sponsored information provided; below that sidebar is a section saying "people also search for" that mentions Etsy, Shopify, Poshmark, and Mercari. That section isn't sponsored either.

As a point of comparison, I also searched for "mortgage loans". (Same window, new tab, google.com.) On that search, there is no informational sidebar, and the results panel begins with a section called "Sponsored Results" which occupies the entire vertical extent of the browser window. (And consists of all of four links, with blurbs.) Below the sponsored results is the AI overview, and below that are the genuine results.)

I don't on that exact search but I do see it when I try this in the iPhone App Store. I do also see it on my Android when searching the Playstore.

It was an example. You're getting lost in the weeds. Similar to this saying BuT sOmEoNe ElSe WiLl GeT tHe ToP sPoT

>But why the fuck should any company pay for an ad when the user explicitly searched for their product?

If you don't buy out the top-place for the query, someone else will. In a better case a competitor - imagine Facebook Marketplace being the top result for "ebay". In the worst - a phishing site. The latter happens quite often for software searches.

Right, but that's because Google permits that. OP is saying Google should simply stop permitting advertising over the real answer.

Why would Google give themselves less money?

It should be illegal to mislead the users like this. The search terms weren't generic and didn't match anything.

Let me repeat myself

  >>>> When making more money requires degrading the product you know we've fucked up

That just sounds like business to me. You do whatever makes money.

This is called enshittification. Business behaves like with with the lack of regulations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41277484

Maybe it is today, but that's not how it's always been. The idea is that competition means the best product wins. But there's a lot it ways to degrade competition, not just monopolization. We're living in a lemon economy

There's never been any rule that the best product wins. Trivial example if I make RAM chips and give them away for free I'll lose.

There's a lot of reasons, but it's probably how Google makes most of their money - brand names end up being high value ad targets - at least 6+ years ago when I worked in that sphere of things (ecommerce, primarily). It's legit extortion.

I guess that's why - because extortion is immoral. Eventually, those paying the protection fees will eventually find someone better to pay or will stop paying when the protection doesn't show up.

Well because you are not paying for ads.

You are paying rent. Alphabet and Meta own all the real estate of the web, and you have to pay them rent to survive.

> ads in search

Right, but you know what's even more effective than ads in search? Biased (towards paying customers) information in LLM output.

The main reason Google loved search was because it was the primary way they got your personal info. Now Chrome gives Googles your entire browsing history, Gmail lets them read your email, youtube tells them what you're interested in, android gives google your entire life offline and suddenly the only thing google search is good for is as just one more website pushing google ads.

AI is going to be great at pushing ads. Plus AI trains you to give google even more control. Instead of just presenting you with a list of websites offering different perspectives and opinions on something, Google can just tell you what they want you to know/think (or not tell you anything they'd rather you not know/think about). The more you get used to treating google like an oracle instead of a librarian the easier it will be to manipulate you.

They only dominate Ads because they dominate search if everyone leaves Search the ad business grinds to a halt as well. These are the ying and yang of Google.

Kind of. They dominate ads because the dominated search when they bought the successful ads company. By that point in time, they already had your profile built, and the further use of search just continues to enhance that profile. But now that ads has its own persistent tracking that dependence on search is not as strong as it used to be

People have reported a decrease in ROI from spending on Google ads already when they no longer control all the eyes and where you rank in what those eyes see when they search, that ROI will drop even more. People will stop paying for Google ads when the ROI is higher on other platforms.

Couple that with the fact that a lot of folks have moved their search to GPT or Claude once those platforms start taking in ad money... that budget will come from somewhere and that's likely existing Google ad buy dollars shifting.

> when they bought the successful ads company

Could you elaborate on this? What ad company did Google buy?

DoubleClick (2008, according to Wikipedia)

doubleclick.net, about 20 years ago.

May be search is not the golden goose, perhaps more the carrot that brings the user into range of the shitty stick of ads and data leeching.

I'm a bit afraid that although AI is being presented as part of the carrot, it may actually be a shittier stick.

There's a no ads in the Ai result though. And even if they add there isn't space for like 4 or 5 ad results like some searches can return. Some Google searches I have to scroll a whole screen away before I see a real result.

This. Google wants to sell advertising. If they can embed advertising into AI and make more money, they will.

You ask AI for a product recommendation. It says "Buy X from Acme". Is that paid product placement? Who knows?

This is just wrong. They are working AI into search so that AI does not cannablize search. Search goes hand-in-hand with ads.

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