Google value plunges by $500B as AI fears rattle Wall Street | Hacker News Reader

Google value plunges by $500B as AI fears rattle Wall Street

bbc.com

81 pointsdabinat35 comments

Is this mid air turbulence or the engine flaming out prior to a crash?

Maybe they should have released Gemini Carbon for real rather than teasing it.

i'm disappointed that Mythos is an Anthropic model because it would be the perfect naming for Google's models since they only actually exist in benchmarks or press releases

There’s too much actual value for a flaming crash.

There was a lot of value in the internet too but it didn’t prevent a crash.

I think you're overlooking a lot of what didn't make it. So many local ISPs, random delivery services, and online stores from that era are gone. They used the internet, even offered it, but often burned through capital without having anything to show for it.

If you look at job listings right now, there's a ton of "we apply an LLM to your business use case" type startups that really don't have good products or fundamentals, but that are getting a lot of funding because "AI".

They use LLMs, often have flashy demos, but can't keep things aligned and struggle to keep the models on task. E.g. they have burned a ton of capital and don't have a lot to show for it.

The ones that went all-in on vibe coding are even worse off.

If those startups die, the big inference providers lose a lot of customers.

That is my point. A lot of the early dot com companies didn't survive. Just because AI has value does not mean there has not been over investment or investment in the wrong places.

Idk there’s a lot of unicorn startups with valuations more than 100x earnings with no path to profit.

A lot of the token spend is circular in nature and f500 has not seen a meaningful revenue or profit improvement from AI.

Sure looks like the dot com bubble.

Google is probably going to be fine. The web is going to get a bit weird in a few years and they're going to be right in there.

The web is likely going to layer up soon. As more and more people utilize AI it changes traffic. It's impossible (and undesirable) to keep training with current affairs, LLMS need to go out to the web to find reality and they need to do search in order to get there.

More and more they're going to get blocked from doing so via "human" channels. I predict we're going to get a sub-web. basically MCP but for websites, AI interacts with a sites content through that door, humans use http.

When there's a gold rush sell pickaxes. Forget Gemini, that's a money pit. Google is in a great position to shape that sub-web through chrome and it's current incumbent position as gatekeeper to the web. They'll be selling search deals to all the Big AI agents, indexing the new MCP-like layer so AI can search and interact with site information and blurring the line between your harness and chrome such that browsing the web is more like asking AI for crap and getting pages there in the harness rather than traditional browsing.

before you know it nobody will browse the web the way we do now and no agent harness will function correctly without Google.

Maybe “the semantic web” will be making a comeback https://www.w3.org/RDF/

How? In past it was sold to website owners as something that will improve their position in search results. Now they see for what it was, a way to make it easier for Google to slurp content for their "zero-click search results" feature. And now even that clutch isn't required, LLMs can rip the content from any website, regardless of their owner's intentions.

> More and more they're going to get blocked from doing so via "human" channels

How? Companies have been trying this for the last 2 decades. Its effectiveness has been rapidly declining.

Yeah, even IBM hasn't died yet. Google is going to be completely okay.

I am dreading what this future looks like as there is now an obfuscated middle layer between me and search results. At least when I search Google I can use my finely honed senses around what is SEO garbage vs a reputable site. And I can infer a lot from the site itself in terms of if they are biased in how they are pushing something.

But with models calling for results and not seeing what Google or others are serving back, and then having the AI give you a summary of reviews or rankings for shopping for example, it is really scary how much more opaque that will get.

It means the spending spree is on hold. The credit window for the neoclouds remains closed. Now the hyperscalers are feeling the pain. The narrative was that the hyperscalers could lean on their prodigious cash flows if the data center rush didn't pan out. This round of earnings reports adds some doubt to that narrative which is spooking everyone. Hyperscalers are still projecting a further increase in capex in 2027, but one has to wonder how long that will last if conditions stay the same.

The next step is whether data center capex discipline begins filtering to Nvidia and the DRAM semis revenues. At that point pure play companies must drive revenue growth or else.

I’ve never encountered in my life a new technology that was adopted this quickly. In just a few years AI is being used in some way by almost everyone, no matter if they’re tech-savvy or not. It’s also interesting that everyone uses it but it’s also pretty widely hated at the same time.

The demand is there - I just don’t think the revenue streams have been fully figured out yet. Ultimately I think the AI providers will converge on allowing their AI to respond to queries with sponsored suggestions, quite simply because there’s too much money being left on the table to not do that.

Google is making these massive investments because they’re terrified that they’re going to be eclipsed or turn into IBM. But Google has way more of a buffer to play the long game than OpenAI or Anthropic.

Never in history has a new technology been forced on so many people so quickly. Most people do not have the option to not use AI, which is a large part of the hatred.

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50291902

Alphabet Announces Third Quarter 2026 Results [pdf]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50280197

For the first time ever, Google Search is less than 50% of Alphabet's revenue

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50291945

Did people think it would just keep going up?

No!

Well except the whole HN crowd, the CEOs, the US president, and... The whole valley...

I think it's going to keep going up

In our fake monopoly money economy, the line always goes up!

Google is a free ChatGPT for when you feel too lazy to select temporary chat with fast reasoning.

As a Kagi user I genuinely do use google for that nowawdays. I assume they'll move it behind a paywall for that reason

Why not use Kagi's !quick for that? Because it's not as quick as Google's?

It's so funny how people's behavior converge to the same patterns over time. A few years ago I was using Google searches with "reddit" appended when I wanted to see genuine people's opinions, such as reviews. Later it started getting written in mainstream how everybody was doing it. Now you are saying about Google as a quick LLM chat (because it's easily reachable from the browser's URL bar) and that's exactly how I've been using it too.

So probably the rule is, if I have discovered some convenient usage pattern, it's very likely that many other users have it discovered independently, too.

Also, it's interesting to see how Google's value has fallen to the point when it's used mostly for very low stakes use cases.

I can't be the only one who has ditched google search because it now returns a half a page of AI summaries (frequently with errors even I can spot) followed a by a second half page of sponsored results....

You are not alone

It’s hilarious to see “AI fears” in the headline when the truth is Google missed its earning estimate.

I’d say it’s more than revenue growth is below estimates than any “AI fears”

I rarely use google search because AI can do searching with more effort than I'm willing to do 99% of the time.

And why is revenue growth below estimates?

Lower search and ad revenue.

The "AI fears" are fears that AI is going to gut Google.

I think that Google did it to themselves by making their search so bad that it encouraged everyone to switch.

They would have had a longer runway as the folks who stuck to Internet Explorer, the folks who stuck with AOL, and all the other businesses that had better options but rode out that friction to switch could have kept them solvent.

Instead, they spent far too much time making Google search difficult to use or to find anything and pushed them off the platform.

"However, profits at the company fell by a considerable 25% during the quarter. And for the second time in its history as a public company, it showed negative free cash flow, this time in excess of $9bn. That's almost twice the loss of cash Alphabet showed just three months ago."

I have always been moving away from relying on Google web search. I've never felt like I'm missing anything because it just keeps getting more user-hostile every year. I gave up on it entirely after the Javascript requirement and opaque redirect URLs in its SERPs

Funnily enough, I've now started using it again as I discovered it's still possible to get 10-13 transparent URLs with no Javascript, no "AI" suggestions, no cookies, no User-Agent or other superfluous headers and no SNI. I have not triggered any blocks so far and it seems quite robust

How long this will last I don't know but the irony is that this has fewer requirements than all the other major search engines (even DDG started requiring a UA header)

How much cash could Google save if it stopped crawling the web

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