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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

It would be beneficial for the author to look at the revenue for Google Search. Revenue is still growing.

The is something that someone really should study, along with "Who are buying ad space". My theory is that the quality, for a lack of a better term, of advertisers are going down.

Let's say I need a new vacuum cleaner and do a Google search. I get eight sponsored products. Three a links to stores I'd expect, the rest are fairly unknown sites, mostly the "We sell everything" stores. Weirdly enough also only one of them are via Google ads directly, the rest are via PriceToro and Channable, both of which I don't know.

My personal theory is that Google is still making pretty good money, but from increasingly questionable ads.

I believe many of those "everything" sites are just middle men for ordering from other sites.

Indeed.

Not only is search revenue growing, but it is growing at an accelerating rate.

At the same time, operating margins are expanding.

I don't know the name of the logical fallacy where someone personally uses an LLM instead of Google Search and then infers that the search business is dying, without ever reading a financial statement.

Indeed. Money over everything. It is absurd to complain about decreasing quality of a product that makes increasing money for increasingly rich people (thus, by definition, better).

If business owners are paying for ads, then it doesn't matter a iota to Google or Facebook if real people use their services. It would be even better for them if real people didn't use their services, since that would save some costs. Business owners are going to keep paying for the ads, as long as they get some number about how many (bot) impressions their ad generated.

There is probably a lag time before advertisers give up on AdSense.

A lot of corporate ad spend is already planned, and Google can adjust the costs up as much as they like. They hold the lever.

If search engine competitors were really eating Google's lunch then ad impressions would go down.

They don't have much of an offering yet. OpenAI has some conventional ads, but everyone expects more involved advertising integrated into the conversation itself somehow.

Even if the alternatives would have no advertising the number of ad impressions of Google Search would go down.

In the article it mentions the rise of other search competitors like Qwant implying they are causing Google to die as it bleeds market share to them.

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