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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

So if I understand it, search numbers are down (because AI is doing what Sam Altman originally saw - AI is a better search engine)

And Google knows it, so why not squeeze the current customers, whatever model AI takes it’s unlikely to be a word matching auction, this model is dead, grab the cash and go.

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> search numbers are down

Source?

Google Search & other revenue grew 12% YoY in Q3 [1]. In that time paid clicks grew 8% and cost per click 4%.

Across the Google Network impressions fell 14%, with cost-per-impressions growing 14%. (9% of revenue.) But that’s on the web, not search.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/0001...

Google has been trying to drop "Network" impressions (by moving them to Google owned properties) for close to two decades now.

The only revenue covered by Network is what it pays out to newspapers and other kinds of ad-supported websites.

Yes but search growth has slowed and it’s making less money thanks to AI overviews. An exec called it out in the earnings call.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/google-admits-ai-sea...

I’ve been saying for a while that AI is going to be a bigger problem for Google than many realize: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47957708

Search is not making less money, as the comment you're replying to just pointed out.

I should have been more precise, it depends on what you mean by "search" -- traditional search is still a huge cash cow, but AI search is not as lucrative, which is what the exec called out in that Ars link. The problem is that AI search is rapidly replacing traditional search.

Personally I have doubts that AI search would ever be as lucrative as traditional search, which I expanded on in that comment I linked.

Schindler said, according to Ars’ source, that “each AI Mode query currently makes less than a traditional search,” coupling “that with the claim that monetization will improve over time” [1]. Ars speculated that the slowdown to double-digit growth is “driven by more consumers using AI chatbots to find answers.” But none of that says Google is losing its user base.

I use Kagi and am skeptical of the debt-fuelled AI build-out. But 12% growth amidst a strategic pivot is unabashed good news. The stock sank because of the capital expenditure, not this.

[1] https://247wallst.com/investing/2026/10/29/google-admits-its...

Right, I don't necessarily think Google will lose its userbase -- although ChatGPT and Claude and heck, even Muse, are formidable threats -- but I do think its ability to monetize each user will drop sharply as users shift to AI search.

Like, in the theorycrafting in my comment that I linked before, I didn't assume any change in userbase; just how lucrative (or not) each step in a chat-based journey could be versus a search-based one.

search numbers are down as a percentage of total revenue, because cloud is up. search numbers are not actually down

This is it exactly. Search is steady while GC is growing by leaps and bounds because all AI iniatives require cloud for hardware and GC is a good option for anyone unhappy with AWS or Azure. The graph makes it clear.

Actually search still grew 12% yoy last quarter

The article says

Search revenue still grew: the share fell because the rest of Alphabet grew faster.

AI can definitely be a more natural experience for search, but it doesn't return better search results.

> but it doesn't return better search results.

It doesn't /inherently/ return better search results, but Google is many years into an intensive project to make their search results so bad that even a magic eight ball, let alone a moderately advanced AI, can do better.

It seems this way - however, it's not.

Google's organic search results are ranked by quality (including how many people click on them).

AI, generally thinks the best result is what's most common, or average, resulting in decent results, but not the best for what you're looking for.

We notice it when we're looking for a level of specificity google can hit, compared to an ai model. It's why Google's AI search can hit a bit differen too.

The example that comes to top of mind is a search that is not made for search rarely can compare to something as well as Perplexity.

> Google's organic search results are ranked by quality

What does this even mean? They're ranked by metrics that are assumed to be a proxy for quality, but (a) the accuracy of those proxies varies widely and (b) the ranks are relative; if a result is no longer in the response pool the fact that it would have been higher quality is invisible. Consider the year where anyone who's profile had been tagged as a software developer couldn't find any information on tost rings for sailplane towing because the "autocorrection" to toString was so strong that no mechanism besides logging out gave any relevant results; there's always crap like this going on.

Google makes a search engine for regular people. It used to make a search engine for engineers, but it has mostly killed that style of searching off.

"News oil prices trump iran" became "Why is gas 20 cents more today? Did something happen with Trump and Iran talks?"

This change even predates LLMs. Regular people were constantly sending queries like that 10+ years ago.

I have started to use the interactive Google summary chat, it's nice to have that initial search result context to follow up on with more questions

Google's AI search is different because they have the history of what right, and quality looks like, it's not just the most common webpages.

Yep, that's it. Search results are just such a bad example. AI just convinces you -falsely- it's results are good, but they suck.

It may or may. not try to convince anything.

Often when we use a search engine, we're trying to piece together something that might be across multiple links, or a single link

Nope. AI has no idea and no complete picture and just acts like it does. Search engines at least give you everything they have.

When I'm looking for info that requires careful parsing of a source site, then LLM is faster. If it's something like looking up the hours of a business googling that local business is better imo. Result is fast you get to see the business picture etc

Search is not analysis like you're describing.

Search has moved on from tf.idf + pagerank at this point. And absolutely they do use things like encoders to produce embeddings that are used in retrieval.

It's not about whether it moves on or not.

Google ranked the best results, not the most commonly occurring ones.

AI is by default returning the highest statistical percentage of what it thinks you are looking for in a response, which may or may not be a search result.

A fun example is having the AI run a search, and comparing it to perplexity, or even gemini a little. OpenAI is improving, and Claude is pretty consistently not made for comprehensive search.

Google search results are crap enough that someone only comparing them to various AIs may find the latter more natural.

Much funnier way of putting my same argument above:

https://youtube.com/shorts/zznrzSDptYU?si=sxbbmLkFbTs4C72W

Search numbers are down because Google search has become crap. I know a lot of people which I don't consider tech enthusiasts and they moved from Google to duckduckgo.

I have moved to Kagi myself

Search numbers were up on an absolute basis.

> AI is a better search engine

Google didn't exactly leave us much choice to opt out. I have to use a firefox extension to hide that bit.

AI doesn't really replace search engines, it's just a UX layer on top.

Yes, but google makes money from the ads all around the results, which I won't see if I'm using a Claude's UI.

Anthropic uses and pays for Brave Search. OpenAI uses Bing(perhaps) and their own crawler.

There have always been alternative search engines. People still use Google plenty and its AI Overview has gotten a lot better. Probably plenty good for most people.

> this model is dead, grab the cash and go.

[citations needed]

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