Just curious, but could Google's culture have evolved so that it tends to treat all their users as products by default, even if they're actually not in a particular case? "You are the product, not a customer" applies to most of what they do, and that has to have had an effect.

I'm an ex-googler. It's not that way. Googlers are themselves heavy users of the products.

Ads are treated like any other machine learning problem. The belief is that ads should be (essentially) predicted search results.

The way services are deprecated and prices change makes me feel you are a product, at least if you are early adopter.

Maybe they can offer Google Cloud entirely running on ads, where they inject them at the load balancer. That way they won't have to deal with customer support.

Why are you downvoting? This is how search works and it's not like Comcast hasn't tried the other technique either.

https://www.google.com/amp/www.infoworld.com/article/2925839...