Yahoo did this, most easily seen back on Yahoo Messenger, where I believe they fit an ad in 6 point type between two elements.
I've seen it at plenty of places that does revenue based A/B testing. You do an A/B test, measuring $ vs User retention. Money goes up, and retention maybe is affected, but over a few weeks, it looks like its the same. So you go on to the next test. Eventually, you find you have to do drastic measures to stop bleeding money. I wish I could say how long you need to measure retention for, but its probably too long for the test to make sense.
It will be interesting to see what a desperate Goog might do with access to everyone's email, calendars, and docs.
And I’m also a 40-year old guy, from what I can see at people younger than me they spend almost all their web-related time on Facebook properties: Instagram, WhatsApp groups, Facebook private groups (FB the main app is also dying), with TikTok coming strong from behind. All of these are places where Google Search doesn’t have any reach. So one could say that the 2011 mantra “all arrows behind the same big arrow” (or whatever it was) was quite correct, Google+ was Google the company’s major chance of still remaining relevant in 10 or 15 years’ time. They still have YT, too bad they don’t know how to manage it.
Everything else I get from HN, Reddit, FB, etc.
The instant google results are the vast majority of the time taken from wikipedia. Sports scores and election results are taken from other sites that Google has started top present quite nicely, but that I could easily get elsewhere. Company name searching is basically just using Maps indirectly.
Google as a raw search query product is dying. A competitor could probably service 90%+ of queries just by being great at serving instant result previews at the top for a set of the most popular data (mass-media, wikipedia, local maps).
Usually I find success when it's extremely niche results (usually rare error messages) that have only a few hits on google on some random forum that the other crawlers just didn't index.
For example, just used HN's search bar, and there it showed up in the options ready to customise keywords to my liking (if I wanted to change it).
Before anybody claims it's an additional step, it's not. DDG requires you to know what the keyword is before you use it, which is the same as having to use the search on the site before. So I guess I agree it's a killer feature if you exclusively use Firefox for the time being.
For example if I want to want search wikipedia, I type "en.w" and hit tab.
I use search keywords, such that when I put "wiki example" in the search bar, my browser pulls up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=example
I also do this with several other sites that I commonly use. In doing this, I've dramatically reduced the number of times I use a general purpose search engine in a day.
Do you have a source for this?
i always found this baffling business logic from Google. i think Google is a strong enough brand that a lot of people would switch to it if it wasn't the default. maybe not everyone would switch but not worth $12 billion a year
[1] I worked there and paid attention at their 'life of a dollar' class they used to give Nooglers. :-)
People need to stop coupling their applications to cloud services for this very reason! It really bothers me that people architect their systems tightly coupled to AWS - Amazon LOVES it, of course, because this is the kind of vendor lock-in that Oracle could only dream about. (Amazon's vendor lock in is strictly superior because it is at runtime. I don't think Oracle ever had that power.)
Its incredible that so many companies have embraced AWS so completely, never giving thought to the the fact that they are giving Bezos total power over their technology investments. The sunk costs are only going to snowball, and AWS can and will raise prices almost arbitrarily, because opting out of AWS will mean a rewrite, which is some multiple of those sunk costs. That is, a company has to recapitulate ALL the money they paid to build software ALL AT ONCE. This is an existential threat to all small businesses, and an easy "just pay extra" grumble for medium and big businesses. Again, great for Amazon, bad for everyone else.
Google can and should get in cloud by pushing cross-cloud technology that lets companies have their cake and eat it too: cloud-hosted auto-scaling applications, AND the ability to pick a new cloud vendor without a rewrite. I suspect K8s is a good push in the direction. So, yeah, it's counter-intuitive but I think G could win big by pushing vendor-independent cloud tech, starting with K8s. The dream is that Google can cancel whatever it wants, and customers will just make an account at another cloud provider and keep rolling.
I've only ever heard people complain about this on here, nowhere else.
Perhaps at startups. At big companies, the call is made by directors and VPs that are well fined by sales people - and that's where the real money is.
I saw it real time with Maps changing its pricing model, where an international company reworked all their maps display. It was a lot of money, and it's not something you brush under the rug explaining the contracts are otherwise marvellous.
Then there was the whole google chat -> hangouts -> meets transitions with every variations in-between, and messaging applications are one of the most sensible tool to change in an enterprise environment. In particular the bigger it is the worse these changes will be perceived.
When came time to choose between AWS and GCP, the choice was clearly political, more than the technical merits.
I'm short on Google Cloud.
In my view, the biggest opportunity is AI. If I was CEO of Google, I would make a massive investment not just in research but engineering turn-key AI systems that can give businesses a massive boost.
They could have owned the cloud.
For the record, I don’t think this is FTC compliant. It also reeks of the kind of this that regulators would adjust their laws for. Google is playing with a situation where regulators may write very explicit rules that say exactly how much labeling their ads need. A 50%-75% chop in outgoing paid clicks would be material to their earnings. They’ve been in a situation for a decade where a large chunk of their most valuable demographic had no idea they’ve been clicking on ads. That isn’t a metric they should be getting more greedy on.
Regulators could just set up a test where, if a large enough percent of users don’t know they’ve clicked on an ad, paid disclosure has to be more explicit.
The low hanging revenue fruit for Google at this point is very sparse. Financially incentivized executives are scrambling to do questionable things to hit bonuses that probably shouldn’t be attainable. Kind of like Boeing.
It is an unpopular opinion but I believe Google is dying. They have been for a long time. The cancer is that nothing other than search ads generates the revenue and margins they need and the margins on search ads are now down 90% from where they were in 2010.
Personally I'm long on Microsoft/Bing as a candidate for the surviving English language web index. My prediction (which isn't shared by many so don't be surprised if you disagree :-)) is that once Google's dying becomes mainstream and they start heading into ground that Apple will buy their assets, keep Maps, Search, and maybe Waymo and throw the rest away.