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Comment by eitally | Hacker News Reader

I think the problem is fundamentally this: how do you decide what is a cool product, and whether to work on it or not? Subsequently, how do you sell it to the engineering & PM teams to get them to actually do it? Remember that Google doesn't really work in the same way as most product companies and these two things aren't necessarily straightforward.

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I mean you're right but it just sucks when you have this massive cash pile that could be used to experiment in interesting ways. Google should figure out a way to monetize that isn't just maximizing clicks and optimizing ad revenue. That's so lame. I understand that advertising (in theory) could really show you stuff that you want in your life and maybe even need, but we aren't even remotely close yet.

It's clear that it's a volume "let's hit users with tons of stuff they just searched for on Amazon", not a surgical strike "let's get users to buy what they need for their own life based on all the stuff they do through our platforms"

In the last three months I've noticed three string queries on Google give me back results with two strings and then one of the strings will have a strikethrough. Sometimes this spans multiple pages. This is terrible

> Google should figure out a way to monetize that isn't just maximizing clicks and optimizing ad revenue.

After many years of things like 20% time, no one at Google has created anything that monetizes at a level close to ads. Why would they double down on what hasn't worked?

It's important to note that most engineers at Google don't actually work on Ads or anything to do with monetization directly. Most will be working on things like Search, Gmail, Android, Maps, Docs/Drive, YouTube, Chrome, etc etc.

I'm pretty sure Google doesn't really have a plan to monetize any of those things (other than ads), but I think it's also pretty cool that a small minority of the company makes enough money to let the rest do pretty much whatever.

I probably use Search the most out of all the other products in terms of volume usage per query (i.e. 1 video watch vs 1 search query) and I have noticed the search results getting less relevant to what I want over time. I'm always impressed by the speed at which they crawl but getting a strikethrough when I search something complicated is aggravating. Eventually someone will develop a superior search engine if they don't return to focusing on quality and relevance of results rather than just prioritizing paid content.

Their other option is to monetize search queries i.e. allow people to build on top of their search data - making search a platform on top of which apps can be built. Providing the ability to run queries over the returned results on any keyword.

Whether it would generate revenue I dont know but testing it out should be easy.

Pick a small country - provide full unlimited search API access for a year to anyone and see what gets built.

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