this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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Imagine if they put a fraction of that money into...I donno...actually making their search algorithmically competitive.
Right? My takeaway from this is that it was cheaper for them to do this than it was to make a good search engine.
It doesn’t matter how good a secondary product is, most users will stay with the default out of a mix of (lack of) expertise and apathy. What this tells me is that the average user makes Google substantially more than this amount after all other expenses are added in.
Google (well, Alphabet) is worth over 1.5T dollars. They could have paid this and made the search engine better. You imply that Google is a poor (general purpose) search engine, but Google became Google by being a better search engine than all the others and, afaik, hasn’t really lost that position. It’s been enshitified by the increase in advertising volume and by the natural language model which benefits non-technical users at the expense of more syntactically exact power users, but neither of those speak to the core algorithm.
That is true, until it isnt anymore. At one point Google will become so shitty and other search engines much better, that everyone will start to switch over, but at that point its too late for Google to do anything about it.
But thats somehow beyond the grasp of every shareholder ever (or they plan on selling the stock in a few years anyway).