lol, yeah that dude has a serious fundamental misunderstanding of how economics and business works. it's like saying mcdonalds backend operations (food prep, management, real estate leasing, training, purchasing) are operating at a loss in order to support their frontend operations of selling burgers. complete nonsense.

> Without their search engine, there is no advertising business.

They do have significant advertising businesses beyond search (AdSense, gmail, etc.).

Yes there is. A lot of Google's advertising business is selling ads on other people's sites, and they use the information from their search engine to target that; they could run the ad business without it (using data from Google Analytics and elsewhere) - after all it ran as an independent business when Doubleclick owned it.

My understanding is that if search and ads were separate businesses and ads paid search for search result ads at market rates then search would not be profitable (similarly for e.g. Gmail). (In reality if search were an independent company then it might be able to be profitable by selling information to ads in addition to direct advertising revenue - OTOH the legal barriers to selling information to a third party might make that impractical, whereas conveniently they're not an issue while Google remains a single company)

According to their 10K [1] 76% of their advertising revenue and 68% of their total revenue comes from advertising on Google properties. Reducing their revenue by 76% surely wouldn't allow them to "run the ad business without it."

[1] Page 24, https://investor.google.com/pdf/20141231_google_10K.pdf

> 76% of their advertising revenue and 68% of their total revenue comes from advertising on Google properties. Reducing their revenue by 76% surely wouldn't allow them to "run the ad business without it."

While I don't agree with the parent you're implying that search is the ONLY Google property that displays ads but that's not true. A decent percentage of that is coming from gmail. I'm not sure how much however.

Where is this understanding coming from?