alt Hacker News>Google could have been an advertising company with a search engine. I'm glad they aren't.
They kind of are though?
Like, there is indeed amazing research supported by the company. The core user facing products are really declining in quality by being user hostile.
A search right now results in a made up LLM output followed by 4 ads disguised as content, and then maybe followed by the wanted result.
I’m not sure what happens inside the company for those two things to be true at once.
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In 2024, 78% of Alphabet’s revenue came from ads (72% in Q3 2025).
Ads subsidize experimentation of loss-generating moonshots until they mature into good businesses, or die.
A big part of what makes Google Search awful is just the usual SEO shitters, trying their hardest to rig the game on any search result that's anywhere close to common or profitable.
Google's main failing there is that they don't put enough effort into their search to keep up with that, and fail to raise the bar on garbage content and search engine manipulation.
LLM output in search results I'm not against. Do you need to open an entire website to learn how to sort an array in JavaScript with a lambda function? For many of the more common and more trivial requests, LLM output is well in "good enough".
It’s not like there isn’t precedent, monopoly power and total market dominance has frequently turned into world beating research centers. Bell labs being the most obvious, but xerox parc and others have come and gone over the last century.
They're the new IBM or Pacific Bell
>>Google could have been an advertising company with a search engine. I'm glad they aren't.
>They kind of are though?
Splitting[1] is a psychological phenomena that you'll find often once you learn to recognize it. Google can both be doing great research, and run a significant influence operation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)