Please don't think the audience here on HN is naïve enough to believe rhetoric like "Search is the product." It isn't, and it never has been. The product is the ads; they pay for the mechanisms that display the ads, whether that's search, YouTube, GMail, or whatever. Those things are undoubtedly useful services, but the product Google makes is ads. Everything else is marketing.
Also I'm pretty sure you can disable all promotions within Gmail, and I'm fairly sure that Inbox has, to my knowledge, never shown ads. So as billboards go, I think it's anything but brilliant, since it has never shown me an advertisement!
Much like how CoLab[1] apparently exists solely to show you ads and how hangouts and Google Voice are there just to show you ads (I'm not sure where though). Duo is just a video chat app to show ads. Clearly.
This argument is so silly. Indeed there are people at Google whose job it is to do things with ads. That doesn't mean that everything that Google does for free is intended to be monetized with ads (see, again: CoLab, which gives away free GPU compute). There are a variety of reasons for a company of Google's size to make products freely available. Showing ads is one of those reasons, but by no means the only one.
Note: I work, tangentially, on Gmail.
[1]: https://colab.research.google.com/notebooks/welcome.ipynb
For a very contrived definition of "product", search isn't a product, and for other definitions, it surely is.
You're trying to make a point that as search engine users, we are a means to an end for Google, like cattle on a farm.
And I agree with that.
But we can discuss this directly, there is no need for a passiv-agressive proxy discussion about what definition of product is right. And there is no need to draw the whole HN audience into this.
Whatever creates the revenue is the product that is being sold. Broadcast TV creates content for the purpose of attracting viewers that watch the ads that are sold as ad space/time for revenue. Product placement within the content plays a role as well.
I don't understand how this isn't clearly understood. That's been the business model for broadcast TV since pretty much the beginning. It hasn't been a secret, the networks have been rather clear about it.