alt Hacker NewsGoogle Search is now less than half of Alphabet’s revenue
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Somewhat impressive that search share of revenue is 5% down, but search revenue is 12% up..
A few days ago a Google found me something I was searching for, but via ads and not search. In the middle of searching raw part numbers, the ad became 100% relevant. It was a weird experience clicking on the ad; something I never ever do. So maybe this is a bit of good news? Yardinflatables.com if you're curious.
I'm wondering who published "Attention is All You Need" and brought this devastation to Google... Oh I remember, it was Google.
Google purposely killing the golden goose by forcing all of its users to use the AI overview is a bold strategy.
am i remembering correctly that "google cloud" in the earnings isn't just developer's google cloud bills (that's google cloud platform), it's also basically any product where a consumer or enterprise pays money to google for anything other than advertising - google drive storage, gemini pro, enterprise google workspace plans...
I checked my Google search history. Compared to pre-AI era, my search volume reduced by 90%+ (from daily 200 searches to like 5).
And the AI response in the Google Search still has factual errors occasionally...
On the contrary, the ChatGPT has been doing great. The accuracy, recall, precision, or whatever metrics of ChatGPT exceeds Google Search by a large margin. Or close to or exceed what a human expert can do
Isn't this good news because they're diversifying their streams?
I've tried to switch to Duck Duck Go unsuccessfully three times since its inception.
This time I have had no problem switching. I'm using Duck for 99% of anything I search for and it's just fine.
The 1% of the time, if I'm really stuck on something I try google shopping or images and its usually no better.
I realized quickly that google search was giving me a very distorted view in its search results, it is making a lot of specific editorial decisions that I wasn't quite aware of, or had lots awareness of over time.
Duck.ai is pretty good too. It's been nice to be able to finally switch, and it'll be interesting to see what happens with duckduckgo now that they can truly see some sustained growth (I can't be alone in this experience).
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.
> to re-encrypt old emails
Does that mean the e-mails are decryptable by the company? That wasn't my understanding of Proton's business model, especially between Proton accounts where I thought they were supposed to be Zero Access Encryption, which is supposedly public key crypto (being asymmetric encryption).
I don't have the imagination right now to figure out how you'd back-encrypt with stronger encryption unless it were symmetric.
I'd be curious how much Workspace contributes to Google's revenue. I don't see it broken out anywhere in the reporting. Assumedly it's part of the $30.7B cloud revenue.
I was just looking in the Workspace account of a relatively small local business, and realized they're spending ~$6k/yr on Workspace. Multiply that by however other small businesse are on Workspace, add in larger enterprise customers, and you're probably at a decent chunk of revenue.
Ironically, Google is likely more dependent on the success of Anthropic and OAI than they are on the success of Gemini.
They have an all you can eat buffet of cash from those two sitting right in front of them, but they can't build DC's fast enough to capture it. If that buffet dries up, the damage would probably be much worse then Gemini becoming non-competitive.
I maintain my own index of domains. It contains also youtube channels, and github repos.
I do use search engines, and chatbots, but when I need to find a tool, a project, a channel, it is just easier.
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
https://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-top - also a simplified, trimmed version of it
I don't rely on search engines that much any more.
Google has what all its competitors want desperately right now: 2 decades of data. That's their moat and where they will extract the most value as they increasingly lean into AI search results.
OpenAI and Anthropic can catch up, but first they must invent Google search, Google Maps, Gmail, Google Calendar, Youtube and Android.
Alphabet shares down 13% today: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/29/alphabet-google-microsoft-ms...
Cloud and advertising is where the money is made for Google. This does not change with generative AI.
Pretty remarkable (in the age of AI) that search/ad revenue actually grew 12%. Anyone have a rational explanation why is that the case?
Title makes it sound like Search shrunk, but it's rather everything else grew drastically, especially Cloud. This diversification is generally a good sign, but investors still seem to panic.
But Ads is still 73% of their company revenue when you factor in YouTube.
YouTube did ~$60B in revenue last year.
This article is missing the point. $GOOG didn't drop because search revenue is down. Search revenue, and revenue overall, actually grew. It dropped because the rate of growth is lower than expected, and the price of a stock is determined by how investors think the company will be worth a decade from now.
Makes me want to own the stock now that they are more diversified. I will never understand why they didn't want to own all of Waymo but did for pretty much everything else.
Well they probably knew it all back in 2017 so I’m sure are very well prepared to pivot into whatever comes next.
Where is AI in this?
Search was $63.4B "Everything else" was $64.2B, out of which GCP was $30.7B
Is AI on the 33.5B remaining post GCP? or within the 30.7 of GCP?
Google cloud could've been more if they didn't drop the ball.
The fact that this was ever more than half should make us extremely suspicious of the whole search engine. Almost all of that money is coming from paid manipulation of search results.
So do you think this will be the continue trends of Google's search engine will be less portion of the company's revenue?
How would you expect search forecasts to be met if most of the time you get "are you a robot" or clanker summaries if you are lucky.
Search no longer works and you are killing your most important product with AI that nobody wants. If search worked like in 2010, no one would use AI answers.
Cloud computing is really a money printer right now. Amazon makes more from AWS than from their retail business, it's nearly 2/3rds of their profit.
Looks like a good buying opportunity for GOOG. Just bought 7 shares.
This has been the plan for a long time.
I remember 10 years ago that Google was extremely paranoid about having the whole company propped up on one revenue tent-pole.
Related:
Alphabet Announces Third Quarter 2026 Results [pdf]
Great, now they won't mind so much when we break Search out of Alphabet, because it's a monopoly... :D
Gemini is terrible, it's trash especially after downgrading to the free version. I have to prompt it two to three times for it to understand what I am asking it. It seemed better when I was paying for it while it's free competitor models (the other 4) always answer me right away.
Google Search sucks nowadays.
What is even stranger, though, is ... the alternatives suck even more.
I don't know where to even start. Take qwant. Well, first check they do is "are you a bot". That's wasting my time. I am not a bot. But, while this may be a minor annoyance, qwant also yields crap results. It does, however had, which is quite interesting, also yield results that Google search does not yield. I had some good results here with regards to images. But in general, searching the www for useful information, really took a dive in the last 5-10 years. And a HUGE dive. Many people noticed this. There are tons of webpages pointing this out. And videos on youtube too (owned by Google, the monster that ruined its search engine).
I am surprised google search still yields any money to Google, considering how crap it has become. In the past I could even read webforum entries in behind the "you must be logged in". I did this, for instance, on a text-based MUD I retired from many years before that, but I was still curious what kind of changes they made. Then google removed that feature - and many more - deliberately. That was when Google decided to cripple its search engine. Then came AI slop and slop-degraded the remaining rest. The nuclear slop holocaust eradicating useful information. Thankfully Wikipedia still exists, and while it has several issues, quality-wise it is a blessing compared to what we typically see nowadays.
On the path to being cancelled!! /s
I get what they're trying to say, but it still seems a bit unconventional to have a line chart where the y-axis is a share percentage.
Here's a graph with revenue in dollars by segment:
https://www.pasteboard.co/DwvXdQj2LXpk.png