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Google just had its first negative cash flow quarter due to massive AI spending (arstechnica.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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[–] 6 points 3 months ago (13 children)

The question is what would happen if they didn't spend on AI.

People got used to instant answers from chatgpt and perplexity. If Google didn't follow, their market share would slowly drop

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  • [–] 14 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    Would it? I turned off the AI answers from Google and most of the people I know also ask how to turn it off.

    In my circle, most of the people I know are more annoyed by it than helped by it.

    Also, they're getting sued in the EU by giving incorrect answers in the AI summary, cause that's actual info FROM Google instead of answers Google is pointing to.

    Sure, there's Gemini that people are actively reaching out to for answers, but cramming it into their main product is way more of a miss for me and the people I know in real life.

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  • [–] -5 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    I use Gemini for search more then google these days. Wading through all the outdated and useless results is very annoying.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago* (2 children)

    So you just let Gemini summarize and then make up and add random shit to the outdated and useless results for you?

    Very efficiently lazy, indeed

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    Even people who use AI in search would fall into that trap. The output is one thing, how you take it is another. I sounds like people mostly don’t check sources, which is the biggest problem. Not saying that person does or doesn’t check sources. Aside from that, Google forcing AI into search is fundamentally the opposite of their business model. If they don’t direct people to sites to buy stuff, how do they expect the sites that they are scrapping to survive? So they scrap and don’t pay and kill the source due to excessive energy demands? Only like Amazon could survive that. Google’s search should be a utility and Google should be broken up. In the meantime, I highly recommend people use DuckDuckGo or StartPage or Kagi (paid), or any other search engine that hasn’t been on a mission to destroy SEO in favor of advertising and AI.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (6 children)

    Well with all the money they pumped into ai they could have instead worked on making their search engine better at returning relevant and accurate results. Then when people clocked the fact that ai was giving them 50% bullshit, they would realise the juice is worth the squeeze with actually getting accurate info

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Google hit as big a market share as they could, so their way to grow the search machine was to increase the market.

    How do you increase the market? By pushing the most relevant links further back, so people have to go to page 2, 3 or 4. So it's unfortunately the best financial decision, short term, to enshittify their main product

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    Their main audience isn’t the end user, but the shareholders. All that matters is they can say they are still “growing”. Which is why they don’t care about making things worse. Same goes for Meta. If something succeeds, it’s a happy accident secondary to the goal. Each of these companies did have a good initial idea that was fundamentally good and better than the competition, but ultimately will not last forever for reasons like this. Something else will eclipse them in time. History is full of corpses the likes of these companies. Recent tech ones include IBM, HP, and Microsoft. All big (or moderately big) players today sure, but not what they were at their prime and not close to the “main” ones anymore.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago*

    I do not agree Microsoft is in that category, but they're mainly a B2B player today.

    A little less than 20% of revenue per earnings '25 was from consumers - The rest for business offerings. I'm curious to hear which selection of companies you consider the main ones. Because Microsoft is still top 5 within Tech when it comes to power.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    making their search engine better at returning relevant and accurate results

    This isn't the goal. The goal is monetization. Giving good results is useless to them if they don't make piles of money doing it.

    Which ironically means you're getting 50% bullshit from Google as well, but AI delivers it much faster.

    (I'm agreeing with you if that isn't clear.)

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