2bi USD is like 1% of Google's annual operating expenses.

yup, but that would be a great way to google if they want to move away from ads. Years of software engineering in great apps, integrations, google maps, etc.. that's can for sure generate more $ if, they invest more time on that, but I agree that will never beat the ads machine.

Not only are the numbers impressive, the tools are impressive too.

But that doesn't change the reality that ad revenue related to search is the lion's share of Google's revenue. That makes them exceptionally vulnerable for a company of their size and breadth. And in that vulnerable area, anecdotally at least, the search quality feels as if it has regressed over the years.

Google was once the gateway to the web. Now they are the gatekeepers of the web.

Maybe I'm just nostalgic. Maybe things were never as good as I imagined they were. Maybe my expectations are unfair. But the Google of my memory was innovative. It delighted. That feels far removed from the Google of today.

>Maybe I'm just nostalgic

You're not. It was so much better up until 2018. Now it only indexing spam blogs And ai generated contents? Search quality is so bad today that duckduckgo is performing actually better in many cases, especially software development related queries

DDG used Bing's index. "Search is so bad that" another trillion dollar corporation, which has been caught copying Google's search results, sometimes returns better results for niche queries, isn't much of an indictment.