Hmmm… my impression was that Google is an ad company, wasn’t aware they did anything but collect data for ads and deliver ads, I’m curious to hear what you work on that isn’t “ads”

Ever heard of google cloud?

Didn’t think it was a real business. But regardless isn’t that also just the services they use internally just externalized for general consumption. So still in many ways supporting the ad business.

It may not be market leader (IIRC it's a distant 3rd) but it is a profitable self-sustaining business unit that employed tens of thousands of engineers.

Currently I work on internal security. Preventing hackers from stealing data, like[1]. I worked on GCP for a while.

My point isn't that my paycheck doesn't come from ads or that I've washed my hands from that dirty ad business. What I meant was that I don't really have internal knowledge about ads, I'm not an authority, and also I don't speak for Google's ad business.

However, after I posted my comment I realized my statement, while true literally, was misleading, because I did intern in ads in 2015, which I had forgotten about when I posted my previous comment. So I'm sorry for that mistake.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora

Unless the older, more well-known company has a larger ad budget, which seems… very likely.

Without ads the big company gets 100% of the mindshare and the small one gets 0%.

With ads the big company gets 99% of the mindshare and the small one gets 1%.

I just came across this example of how ads help (or at least helped) small and medium businesses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37662179