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Comment by i_am_nomad | Hacker News Reader

Why would Google be desperate, though? They are hugely cash positive, have enormous cash reserves, and essentially no competition outside of China.

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They have had many years of revenue growth that exceeds eyeball growth. They did that by slowly pushing organic results down the fold in favor of ads. That trick is played out now...there's little real estate above the fold left to cede to ads now.

So, to maintain revenue growth that exceeds eyeball growth, they need new tricks.

Basically, they set the bar very high.

My wish is that adds fill the first SERP so that I can just go to page 2 and be done.

Damn you, Overture, why did you have to do that!

In my experience with Google search, it rarely gives me useful results on the first page. So much so that I've developed a bit of muscle memory. When I have to resort to doing a Google search, I have to consciously stop myself from immediately clicking to get the next page of results.

Because they appear to be obsessed with growth at nearly all costs. Which each passing month it looks more and more likely that short term thinking has began to drive how Google acts and reacts.

This has been getting more and more clear for a while. I had already lost a lot of respect after Google decided to become a defense contractor, but this is just greedy and antithetical to the values that made most of us start using Google in the first place.

Google has been selling garbage ad placements for years which has been an obvious revenue boosting game, but nobody seemed to care.

Let’s hope Google gets its priorities back in order. I had thought Schmidt leaving the board was a good thing, but he seems to have been pushed out by those whose incentives are much more short term.

Companies can be hijacked by people with the wrong incentives.

> and essentially no competition outside of China

They have less eyeballs, I presume. Their competition is FB + IG + Whatsapp + whatever it is today's young people spend their time on. They could have made YT as socially engaging as Instagram but they failed along the way.

Have you ever heard of niko niko douga? (niko niko video)

No, I have not, but I find quotes like the ones bellow (taken from the article) as pure lies told to their investors:

> The company wants to make it easier for users to discover and buy new products because they shop in spurts while watching TV or sitting in the bathroom

No, no-one in the under-40 target is sitting in front of the TV and then is deciding to shop for stuff, almost everyone in the under-40 target is sitting on their phones (mostly on FB + IG + Whatsapp) even when watching TV, even when in the bathroom, and it's in there (on FB + IG + Whatsapp + other social networks) that the buying decision is made. TV is for the older-than-40 audience.

Growth is slowing and ad load has already reached its limits. If Google has any undeveloped real estate left, there's going to be ads on it.

Now that they've used DBM, DFP, and AdExchange to cement their U.S. ad monopoly, they can only get more growth by shutting down the flow of money to the rest of the internet. So they need more inventory of their own to compete with that of their clients' (e.g. other websites that use Google Analytics, DFP, GCP, AdWords, etc).

I would love to see an estimation of the hundreds of billions of dollars wasted by companies (and by consumers who buy their products) on Google ads.

If an advertiser buys ads and attributes results to them, how is that a waste?

>no competition outside of China

For now. Duck is growing and I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple build their own. Not to mention, the use of content blockers is rising.

For some years now I have the feeling Apple is investing in / helping DuckDuckGo. The most obvious indications are that DDG was added to the list of search engines in Safari, and DDG uses Apple Maps (example [1]). I bet Apple is using DDG to weaken Google while officially keeping a distance.

I also bet Apple is not interested in running a search engine themselves. They would either have to muddy their brand by allowing questionable results, or filter everything that is not family friendly and risk being seen as the big censor.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=silicon+valley%2C+usa+map&t=h_&ia=...

Greed? Please Wall Street?

I don't really know really. Maybe the executives are in fear they will be swept out if they are not delivering on hiking the stock price?

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