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For the past 10 years I've been using google as a search engine and nothing else. I type for the page or content I already know in advance I'm looking for and that's it. I never browsed or clicked on promotions. I found out about new sites and products, always through social media, or news pages. I will continue using it with the same purpose, I can't imagine people spending 15 minutes on a search engine trying to discover something new.

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Why do people post worthless anecdotes like this when we know from trivially available data that Google makes over a hundred billion dollars per year from search.

With enough anecdotes, that 100 billion dollars starts to smell like click fraud. Google owns both sides of the ad market and is less than transparent with how their ads perform or how bids are calculated.

I will be very curious how the promoted stuff works with LLMs. When you ask a LLM what the best brand of shoes are, can folks pay to influence the result?

I personally know people spending 6 figures at the minimum on SEO, because they see huge conversion rates for their own businesses (which are not web-based stuff by the way, more of a niche in person technical services).

I've been using Google for a decade+ too. Phind has replaced about 95% of my Google usage this past month.

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