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simplecto

Imagine having a juggernaut so big and powerful you can no longer afford to innovate on the bottom.

Google was never able to build or buy a social platform to build their walled garden higher.

Instead they reach their tentacles over the other walled gardens and snatch the content.

Google is a shell whose moat is drying up day by day.

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What are you talking about? They make a new type of content that is available on the internet searchable. That’s how Google started and got successful in the first place.

>They make a new type of content that is available on the internet searchable.

How is hijacking a website's search feature and putting it in front of "google.com" new type of content?

50/50 you read the article, so I will leave this here:

> Google is testing a new feature that will surface Instagram and TikTok videos in their own dedicated carousel in the Google app for mobile devices — a move that could help the company retain users in search of social video entertainment from fully leaving Google’s platform.

In short, it appears they scrape and display content from sites they don't own in an effort to keep people on their platform. This is anti-competitive, and any smaller player engaged in similar behavior would have the door shot on their fingers.

Google use help people find their way to interesting places. Now they seem more and more interested in keeping them in a walled garden.

No offense but did you read the rest of the article?

>Both Instagram and TikTok videos were available in the Short Videos row. When clicked, you’re taken to the web version of the social platform — not the native mobile app, even if it’s installed on your device. The end result is that Google users are more likely to remain on Google, as all it takes is a tap on the back arrow to return to the search results after watching the video.

at least they're taking you to the web version of the service they're presenting content from, so it's not like they just serve the content themselves. I don't see a problem with that.

Isn’t that just the app not registering URL handlers with the OS? I’ve clicked YouTube URLs before and it opens the YouTube app.

I recently noticed that some Google search results now load images associated from the content on the search results page when you hover over the search result link.

I have no doubt some users will find it helpful, but it is another example of Google extracting data/content from websites and then displaying it on their own platform making less people visit where the content originates from.

HN hate that Google gets has almost zero impact on Google’s mission to organize worlds information. It’s doing exactly that.

Usual complains about customer service, search ranking, etc are taken into account.

Google walked away from that mission years ago. More and more of their search results are not search results but rather ads.

That is not organized information as we were lead to believe.

Google is losing the war against SEO garbage but they’re not ads. Ironically for shopping results the ads are better at finding thing you’re looking for than the actual content. I suspect that the reason is that stores put more effort into actually sanely cataloging their stock for ad placements than for their main site.

I have definitely made searches on google on a 2015 macbook pro, only to see every link above the fold be an ad.

Google still offers utility but their dominance will be challenged by niche players (in aggregate) over the coming years.

I do not put a value judgement on their behavior. I merely comment on the opportunities presented when they become too big to innovate from the bottom.

Gut feeling says you're right, but their financial performance is extraordinary and based on selling not just ads, but so much more. Google Maps has literally the entire US mapped out in terms of street view, GSuite is such a bargain, GCP is up there with the three big cloud providers. I don't know what Verily life sciences is doing, there is also Waymo (no revenue), and Google X (moonshots).

Last time I checked, ads were literally something like 99% of Google revenue.

I just checked, you're right. I was looking at the Alphabet revenue (parent) and 82% comes from Google Ads. Thanks for the insight.

And the other 18% is probably "non-profitable" ads e.g. YouTube.

The other 18% is things like YouTube Premium/Superchats, Cloud, Android, etc...

...Google’s mission to organize the world’s monetizable information.

> Google was never able to build or buy a social platform to build their walled garden higher.

Does buying YouTube not count?

A fair point. That one is a blind spot for me because I do not use the social aspects of the platform.

Isn’t the vast majority of YouTube videos user-generated content?

I think social media implies there's more than one person involved, if you only watch videos and read no comments that's not really social media. The vast majority of Google search results is user generated content as well

Their mission statement is to index the internet and make it easily accessible. As a lot of internet shifts to Twitter, Instagram and TikTok, it would be a complete miss of their mission to not index and present that data.

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