Google Earning Q1 2024 [pdf](abc.xyz) |
Google Earning Q1 2024 [pdf](abc.xyz) |
This is impressive both because it's hard to keep such a big business growing at that rate and because essentially everyone in my social circle has moved on from going to Google first for information. I guess our demographic is not predictive of the larger market.
I’m not going to use an LLM to shop for car insurance or look for hotels.
- [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/17ky9sg/first_time... - [2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/reddit-sneaky-ai-spa...
As I understand it, this is a great use-case for AI agents (a-la Custom GPT) and I wouldn't be surprised if the tech for that matures over the next year.
Speaking personally, there are some queries where I prefer an LLM. But usually I start with Google, and it's only after 5-10 searches that I get frustrated enough to remember I could just ask ChatGPT instead. So ironically, I actually send more searches to Google than I would have if they gave me the answer on the first one.
I wonder what their search metrics would look like if they removed quick bursts of searches. Presumably, someone searching five times in a row is actually having a bad experience, rather than loving the product so much they came back to it five times in one minute.
Considering the explicit link their growth opportunity to internet penetration (as does Facebook), I would say its a very strong reflection.
Whatsapp certainly isn't driving those ad dollars so it truly is remarkable how disconnected my demographic (loosely using my here) is from the overall world usage.
"Google is dead, no one goes there anymore" is one of the most tired takes I see frequently on HN. It's nice to hear someone express the self-awareness to realize that what they see in their immediate circle is not representative of reality.
The smart money is always going against their hate. It’s not enough to stop using their services, but to also convince their friends and family to switch to their choices.
Or have they ?
Not even because I am particularly going to google, it's just so heavily integrated.
As you said, you don't know how representative is your social circle. And you may underestimate your Google usage. ChatGPT often isn't a good substitute to Google. Looking at my history, a lot of my Google queries couldn't be answer by ChatGPT. Either because I need precise information, or recent information. Often I use Google just to redirect me to some specific site, typically wikipedia.
I'm very delighted that I bought GOOGL stock at $95 when it fell after everyone panicked at their Bard demo a year ago. [0]
Second, Google can still be optimizing/increasing no. of ads served.
I don’t know exactly what you meant by “our demographic”, but I’m a frequent reader of HN, work in tech, and generally stay up to date with all things tech, and yet… I don’t know if a single person that doesn’t still use Google as their go-to place for information. Before this comment I had never even heard of Perplexity or You.com. /shrug
I don't find it useful as a main search engine, but some queries are obviously better handled by something like it.
Anyway, yeah, I guess I'm the only person I know in real life that does not use Google.
There are other search engines and almost all of them are orders of magnitude better than google is now.
I think it is, "our demographic" is just a few years ahead of the masses. For example MacBooks started getting popular with programmers way before they got popular with the masses.
I already include site:reddit.com when searching for reviews, but I think that's been getting astroturfed away.
Only better quality alternative I found that has the same coverage and is available here.
FWIW for my purposes Marginalia is also a lot better quality (less annoying, more likely to give me the results I want - if it has them) than Google now but I cannot use it as my only search engine since the index is still small.
The other big ones (Bing, DDG) managed to still be worse than Google last time I tried despite Google goong out of their way to make it easy for others to walk past them.
There was another interesting one but they discriminated against non Americans and didn't even allow is to try so I don't know. It looked promising though, but as long as kagi don't betray us I get I stay with it.
Not OP, but Kagi/reddit/trustedReviewSites/anywhereButAmazon.
Just remember no one is auditing what views, likes and clicks count Google and Facebook tell you, you are getting. Advertisers just milk corporations. They dont care if the numbers are fake. They are now trained to tell everyone to spend more or you dont get attention someone else will.
As Goldharber once famously said , about the Attention Economy - people have limited attention to give anything but infinite capacity to receive attention.
No one likes to hear or believe they dont really have any influence when the system is signalling they do. So the ponzi scheme grows larger and larger.
There is a great book about it (from an ex-googler) called the Subprime Attention Crisis.
No one knows what to do about it so everyones head is buried deep in the sand.
We need new attention allocation systems that are not market driven.
I went right back to google.
Been a shareholder a long time and 20%+ growth on 11-digit quarterly revenue still mindboggled me
I'm curious what 2025 will look like for Elgoog. There are only so many desperate death throw spin tweaks available before the opportunities for indirection are exhausted.
The only thing this demographic is predictive of is its tendency to overestimate its degree of influence.
I want to say I'm joking, but I've unfortunately noticed that a lot of techies are very self-absorbed and detached from the wider world at large.
There are lots of marketing dollars looking for a home, and Google is going to be one of the better bets for some time to come.
They may turn into a zombie but they won't die for a long, long time.
For example, cable companies still exist and have a ton of paid ads on them.
Fox makes $3-5B in sales per quarter: https://valustox.com/FOXA
Sinclair isn't doing so good but they're still selling in the hundreds of millions per Q: https://valustox.com/SBGI
We've seen this with Neeva which is now no more. Perplexity appears to be no different and only appeals to techies and at the same time is already dependent on Google search for their results, according to The Information.
In fact I can only see them getting shut down like Neeva or the case of Perplexity likely to be acquired. Amazon looks more of a potential acquirer for Perplexity AI.
But search itself may decline over time.
The same happened to everyone from steam train companies to Xerox to cable companies. These guys are next.
The most important item on the report
Edit: 190,711 employees on March 31, 2023
Also, the termination dates for those who were laid off in January 2023 would be around April 2023 (the layoff news came earlier due to WARN act), so the employee count as of 2023-03-31 might not include those people. This means a difference of ~10000 can be accounted for by the 2023-01-20 round of layoffs.
But I am aware that I’m not typical.
Apple gets billions from Google, funding quite a bit of their R&D.
Most of the open source software you use including the Linux kernel has a bunch of contributors from Google.
Going one step further, Google has a large hand in open standards for everything, from wifi to programming languages.
I'm not saying you should avoid these, it's just interesting that you can take so many non-typical steps to avoid google and still mandatorily have them involved in all of your technology.
However, we should also remember that Mozilla's main funder is... Google/Alphabet, via a royalty deal for having Google be the default search engine. See, e.g., here:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-go...
And while the royalties arrangement is not that old, Google was a main funder before that happened as well. FYI.
But I also still use Android, the Google Play Store, YouTube (via NewPipe), Google Messages, Google Maps, and Google Keep because I haven't found great alternatives. It's surprisingly hard to completely get rid of Google.
That and restaurants from maps.
I use it less for information based searches, but that almost seems to be a win from an advertiser perspective.
Lots of other reasons too I think but much of it probably has to do with the change in interest rates.
The only one mention, it's strong position across conservative approach. A must have for any large multi national company like Google.
They already have >150k employees they can redeploy at will to enter any new market.
Capitalism is nuts.
They might have to compete for foundry time, but it's better than having to compete for AI chips.
This strongly suggests that there's an opportunity to spend money relaxing this shortage. If your business growth is being throttled by suppliers, then investment either allows you to grow those suppliers, or vertically integrate them out of the picture.
Massive YoY growth
Massive cash horde, buybacks, dividends
Target of endless legal actions due to market dominance
"death rattle"
Stock up 16% after hours.
And then every other advertiser has compete with that price.
I mean if 2 big movies are being released this weekend and one producer is willing to spend 5 million on ads then pressure on the other producer goes up to spend 6. Its not that simple or scientific to connect how the movies perform to the ads. Same with politics. One jackass raises 100k to spend on ads then their opponent feels pressure to raise and spend the same or more. There is lot of fomo driving this machine.
On top of it Corps love to say the people are buying what they want. But google results show corps are spending a hell of a lot influence who buys what. So are people driving real demand or ad spend driving it?
Everyone is competing furiously for limited Attention. How do you get noticed in a room called the internet where everyone is trying to capture attention simultaneously. It feels like in such an environment of attention scarcity Google and Facebook are like the Oil Cartel. They can control the price.
Everyone wants their shares to go up, more growth, which can then lead to questionable actions on their part. Did you see the recent article about search enshittification (tldr; to make key metrics go up, make search worse so that users have to make more queries to get what they want)?
$320B annual revenue, 15% growth, $0.20 per share dividend and $70B share buyback.
Enough said.
Other than listening and arguing in relatively good faith I don't think HN is a bubble, although such people probably have pretty different opinions than the typical person simply because they listen and change themselves more so it gets more refined.
A bubble in this context has the connotation of ignorance of what is outside the bubble.
The decline of Google's search performance is on the front page of HN at least once a week. It's common knowledge at this point.
Try Kagi if you want to be reminded of what good search is like.
It's not a problem you can simply spend money at, it's a global supply chain problem with many disparate companies each with their own constrained supply chains.
In short, taking some of these steps is reasonable for a person, and some... are not. Painting it as some kind of moral hypocrisy isn't helpful.
Is this announcement a continuation of buybacks at the same rate, or just a renewal of the headroom?
You could argue fb and particularly twitter are incentivized to include it in their DAU counts but market cares more for revenue for large companies.
I wouldn't put it past Google/Meta coopting corporate advertisers. Everyone makes everyone look good, by stating the best possible numbers.
Google maps trumps with pois
It’s actually shocking if you think about products from your childhood which are no longer advertised and have completely dropped out of public consciousness.
The number of people who don't see their bottom line growing, but are spending on ads, getting views is not reported anywhere.
Would also be interesting to see if ad budgets of the largest spenders are increasing with time once market capture is complete.
Poster is correct: that is not the reason for them.
We can confirm this. Compare RSUs granted/year -- $150M -- to buybacks this quarter -- $70B. ~700x as much.
Let's say the average engineer gets $100k/year in RSUs. (I would guess the actual number is higher.) That would only cover 1500 engineers.
However, besides this, google is still my go to for relevant information on entertainment and news etc.
But such searches doesn't generate much ad revenue, so it doesn't do much to Google to lose them, all the people searching for articles about makeup or clothes or games or other things that has strong advertisement potential Google is awesome as a search engine, I haven't seen anyone say Kagi is better there. Kagi is only better for the searches that Google doesn't care about since they generate so little ad revue, Google uses so much compute per search that I'm not even sure such technical searches would be profitable for them to run, likely that would increase profits to lose them to Kagi.
- You can't prove that! I'm not trying the steak until you have evidence that it's delicious!
The typical HN downvoter invited (once) to eat at a restaurant...
In this real scenario, if someone's goog shares were vesting at an earlier value - let's take a rough average at a glance of goog YTD to be $145, they will have lost on a year's worth of dividends at $0.2 per share. However, the current share price is $175.
So, through this maneuver, a person holding N goog shares will lose at most 3 quarters of dividends: N * 0.2$ * 3 = N * 0.6$
But they will have gained whatever the stock has appreciated, which at this moment in time works out to: N * (175-145)$ = N * 30$
What am I missing which would make the scenario above result in OP's claim of "dividends devalue issued unvested RSUs"?
EDIT: This also fails to take into account "Dividend Equivalents (DEs)", which are not factored above, and would yield extra income to the person that owns unvested shares.
- Unvested grants over 4 years vs. buybacks this year - #s are for 2020, not 2023 - # excludes tax witholdings (i.e. shares they'll never grant). - For 2020, grants of 15.539 - 10.273 witholding = ~5B, matching sibling comment's correction - $2.324B is one of 4 columns, real number is $50.274 B - so for 2020, real #s are 5.26B in unvested grants over 4 years versus 50.274B in buybacks that year. - for 2023, 22.578 - 10.164 = 12.4B in unvested grants over 4 years, versus 62B in buybacks that year
It's not possible it makes as much as the main Meta properties. It has no ads on anything people use.
And they obviously cross-reference the data with Instagram/FB to sell you stuff.
In general people way overestimate the # of SWEs at Google relative to the employee #, even within Google.
I don't wanna get too cute in public but some fermi estimates including, say, number of employees per engineer at a 100 person startup, and a jaundiced yet correct view of how much is outsourced at a company with a lot of grunt level SWE work common to every company, bridges the multiplier from there.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1364742/000156459021....
Ah, scammers targeting your LLM assistant will certainly be a thing, this really sounds like the old "I bought the Eiffel tower" scams.
In the simplest case, we could just have trusted authorities provide lists of verified booking partners, same as e.g. Google Flights does now.
I think only competition and/or regulation helps push down the allure that dark patterns present to companies.
Or did you mean Google's AI agent, or hotels.com, or somebody else with a built-in conflict of interest? Well, in that case, no thanks.
The enshittification of the Internet is even worse, though. I think personalized search and content curation through the use of local AI agents may be the only way to buck that trend.
I want something that will do for companies like Google, Amazon, and the news media what SpamBayes did for email: make it useful again. Local filtering by a tireless and incorruptible proxy whose interests are aligned with my own is the only way forward IMHO. The only question is how long it will take. My rather-useless guess is more than a year, less than ten years.
Layoffs can make it look like the company is having problems so instead of doing that they will create vague KPIs so that employees will not meet them so they can be fired.
It's not about how you view your last employer, it's about how your next potential employer will view you.
AFAICT, Google didn't go to the effort of creating vague objectives for people to fail at. Instead they've blanket cut teams regardless of their success or performance.