"Google (www.google.com) is a pure search engine - no weather, no news feed, no links to sponsors, no ads, no distractions, no portal litter. Nothing but a fast-loading search site. Reward them with a visit."
That didn't last long till they added paid results but at least they highlighted the paid results from the organic results... Those were they days when they used to have the motto of not being Evil. Accordingly, now, they are.
Yeah, I remember the long slow fade-out of the colored boxes the ads occupied. They went from like, pastel orange and green boxes, to lighter boxes, to even lighter boxes, to no boxes at all with the word Ad in a little symbol, to the way it is today where you have "Sponsored" on a different line than the ad, and you have to scroll below the fold to even see the first organic result, if there even is one, and only 2-5 organic results are even shown by default. And also of course in the mix, the AI Overview made up from I assume a handful of the spammy results being thrown through the cheapest, smallest model possible and summarized.
This was the venture funding "we're a startup era". And Google succeeded eventually.
But in that era making money didn't matter. It was just about grabbing market space. And oh boy did they succeed.
But all bills become due eventually. Stock holders start demanding continuing increasing profit and that eventually leads to the downfall of any good product.
It's a very common story in industry. You start nimble, and disrupt bloated platforms. Then, as you grow, pressure grows and you also bloat. Then new company comes that brings nimble product and disrupt you.
Search, TV->internet video, newspapers->internet - all of them go through those cycles.
You forgot the main source of pressure: you sell off equity in your company in exchange for cash. The buyers are buying the promise of future profits. At first, you still hold the vast majority of the voting rights, but over time you sell more and more and expectations rise and rise.
Eventually you are an organization whose purpose is to return cash to shareholders in the near term.
Hence a page full of ads, and no reason to think things will ever change.
I think the fact that Valve is still a private corp is a big part of it, yes. It allows for continued ownership by people who have meaningful beliefs of what it means to do something the Right Way and who run the business accordingly. This isn't to say that private corps are always "good" like that - the temptation to go for easy pickings and enshittify is always there. But some owners at least won't do that for various reasons, while a public company seems to always end up chasing short-term profits above everything else.
Google's original founders still hold the majority of votes.
> Eventually you are an organization whose purpose is to return cash to shareholders in the near term.
Amazon's history shows that public shareholders can be very patient with cash being returned to them, or the company ever showing a profit at all. Tesla used to be in the same boat.
Shareholders are very forward looking. They just don't necessarily trust 'visionary managers' not be full of bullshit. Probably rightly so.
>purpose is to return cash to shareholders in the near term.
I see this constantly repeated in anti-capitalist/anti-corporate rhetoric, but on the other side, shareholder meetings, finance conferences, financial service talks, no one ever wants this. Maybe the 20 year old stock bros on discord pumping penny stocks, but no serious shareholder of any company with a name you might recognize.
It happens, there are cases of it, but overwhelmingly the vibe is "long term stable profit generation".
If shareholders didn't want it, then they wouldn't appoint (or keep in place) the top management that repeatedly and consistently makes those choices.
Look at the recent Microsoft layoffs. They purged the company of so much tech talent, and tanked morale for basically all the remaining workers. From any kind of long term perspective this is madness. Yet they were rewarded for it by the stock market.
I think it's a mistake to think of these cycles as inevitable, and that it's guaranteed that some small fry will disrupt the current giants. Yes, they may have happened in the past, but large companies are much more cognizant of the cycles of disruption now than they were 30 or 40 years ago. Microsoft was a behemoth in the late 80s and they're currently number 2 market cap in the world. Many folks on this board may be too young to remember Netscape's boast of "The Browser is the OS" in the mid 90s - well, Netscape is long gone and Microsoft is still giant. Only 2 years ago you saw pronouncements that OpenAI was going to be the death knell for Google, and it was it seemed to be the kick in the pants that Google needed to get their AI story working. Facebook just basically bought all its nascent competition (Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.)
I think disrupting large players will be much harder than it was it the past.
I fully accept the heat death of the universe will eventually take down Microsoft, but I don't think that's what the comment I was responding to was really about.
My point was that this cycle is not a recent thing, but has been present all throughout history. Bell labs fell. The hudson bay company fell. Arthur Andersen fell. All these were much more entrenched than microsoft is today. I'm not suggesting you have to wait for the heat death of the universe.
Don't worry. Our legislators around the world are hard working so this doesn't happen again, protecting us from harmful contents and cementing current industry leaders' position.
Can you imagine a more effective way to incentivise more people to start even more disrupting platforms? Can you image a more effective way to get investors to give money to these upstarts?
It's much easier to get your rabble-rousing startup to threaten disruption (and then be bought up as a precaution), than if you had to actually battle it out in the marketplace to the bitter end.
It's a bad thing for the rest of us, because it means that all those platforms don't actually disrupt anything at the end of the day, and we have to keep eating the same turds.
You get way more of these new platforms popping up. And some of the might not get bought up in time. (And the wealth of the incumbent ain't infinite, so there's a limit to how many they can buy up.)
I think there’s a middle ground between not making any money by not showing ads and plastering half the page with ads in a way that almost renders the product useless. I’m sure this was a result of a long list of promo packets that incrementally kept adding 0.01% increases to the ad impressions.
Just one facet of what we call 'promotion oriented programming' (or promotion oriented design).
Google's promotion guidelines used to include that if you want to get a promotion on a technical track, you have to demonstrate a mastery of complexity. Cue the unnecessary complexity in some projects meant to get the author promoted.
(They might still include that requirement. I don't know. I haven't worked at Google in nearly a decade.)
Google managed to dance the knife edge there for a lot longer than most though. AdWords made so much money in a fairly unobtrusive way, that they were able to scale it out without pissing a lot of people off. That and it was actually even sometimes useful.
They clearly decided to just say "fuck it" though. Sometime after Ruth Porat replaced Patrick Pichette and especially after Sundar took the helm (both happened while I worked there) but most especially in the last 3 years.
Wouldn't it be nice if some companies instead of ramping up ads for revenue passed along the value to consumers? Once they made their money back on the original investments convert to a lifestyle and provide a valuable product without squeezing every penny our of it and in the end killing it. One day maybe.
The problem is who wants to be CEO of that? How many people do you know are simultaneously voracious enough to want to be the CEO of something and also totally chill and down to just have a lifestyle business? How many people do you know would take a salary of $5 million/year and just keep working the same job? Pretty sure almost everyone I know would do that for maybe two years and then quit and retire. Companies doesn't want that. So that leaves us with the kind of people that would take that salary and keep at it. The reason CEOs are different kinds of people from the rest of us is that it stopped being about the money for them a long time ago. It's not not about the money, but after getting enough money for your own lifetime and several other people's, why keep working? Not everyone is cut out for it. Be the change you want to see in the world. Claw your way up to the c-suite and then run the company how you see fit. Just don't let that climb change you so that you no longer want to run it as a lifestyle business.
They did pass on a lot of value to consumers. They used their profits to grow, build Gmail, buy and grow YouTube, build Android.
Just running Google as-is without ads would have produced less value in the long run. Plus the SEO tide (which relied on DoubleClick ads that weren't yet owned by Google) began to rise and would've drowned Google Search much earlier if they hadn't grown.
Where I think Google took the bad (for consumers) turn was when they purchased DoubleClick and began to consolidate the entire ad business. Instead of losing money to SEO spammers, they began to make money. This put Google into a conflict of interest against their own users. Ever since then they've been piling onto that conflict of interest, draining more and more value from their products.
I feel like you'd need a new corporate structure or something, like the way an S-corp is different, but on steroids.
Because I agree, the forced obsession with "growth" at all costs, which seems necessary to operate a public company (at least in this century[1]), is imho the #1 reason why enshittification is unavoidable.
[1] I'd describe nearly all present-day corporations as fixated on quarterly results even at the expense of business viability. Something I truly don't understand is why big companies say, 75 years ago seem to have been so much less that way. If anyone has any theories I'd love to hear them.
People overwhelmingly prefer ad-supported to subscription supported. Google would be a dramatically better service if everyone who used it paid. I really, really, cannot overstate that.
The internet sucks because users feel entitled to everything on it for free. They don't want ads and they don't want to pay subscriptions. uBlock origin, archive.is, and constant complaining about how the content sucks.
The internet is full of children with a naive understanding of how things work. The are so deluded that they even call on companies to simply provide them everything for free if they want to be "successful".
Google has almost $100 billion in cash reserves right now. Big tech together has over $1 trillion in cash - that's in the ballpark of the GDP of the top 20 countries.
The notion that Internet sucks because megacorps have to scrounge for cash doesn't pass the most basic smell test.
Well Google has been a very good example of not giving into that pressure for a very long time. Their landing page remained ad free for decades and their revenue came from sponsored links through ad-words which was a minimally invasive ad strategy which didn't show banners etc.
I remember being clever at school and showing off that if you typed "nukes" it would display an advert for ebay down the right-side. "Buy Nukes on EBay".
They had plenty of success with the ads that didn't disrupt the main results until they decided that search results didn't matter and selling their users to malware was more profitable.
For many years they were very profitable, with great search results and good quality ads.
But like always they didn't stop once they were a bit profitable with a few ads, instead they got greedier and greedier and made their product worse once they captured most of the market, I have wonder if there can exist some variant of capitalism that punishes becoming a bit too greedy, like a soft ceiling (tied to the minimum wage) over which most of the profits go to taxes, and a hard one where all profits over that go to taxes plus mandatory social work by its owners/executives.
> instead they got greedier and greedier and made their product worse once they captured most of the market
I wouldn't necessarily put it that way because not Google, nor any company, has moral capacity. They don't have souls. What they do have are incentive structures, and those flip when the stock goes public.
Pre-IPO: the board is mostly founders and VCs holding paper wealth. Their shares aren't liquid, so the only way they get paid is by making the pie way bigger for some future exit. That means "grow, grow, grow." and that means playing nice with customers.
Post-IPO: the board is legally stuffed with "independent" directors, whose pay comes in RSUs tied to the stock price. Now the shares are instantly tradable, and shareholders who can bail in a quarter want to see results in a quarter. Directors translate that into exec comp, and suddenly management's job is "make the stock go up right now."
Some theorists point out the obvious hack: take away the hot potato. Slow the game down. Make shares harder to flip, make earnings less frequent. If you could only trade stock once a year, you'd actually care what the company looks like in a year. If they only reported results annually, you'd be forced to think in years, not quarters.
Upside: management can focus on products and customers instead of quarterly guidance theater. Downside: investors hate being locked up, and capital gets more expensive because people price in that illiquidity. Transparency drops, execs get more room to bullshit.
It's a tradeoff: you can have maximum liquidity and hyper-efficient capital markets, but then you get short-term brain damage. Or you can slow the game down, but then you're basically asking people to trust managers more and accept worse capital efficiency.
Nobody;s found the perfect middle yet. LTSE[1] tried, dual-class shares are a kludge, and otherwise we just live with the cycle: grow like crazy private, IPO, then spend the rest of your corporate life addicted to quarterly earnings.
In the old days, companies were valued on their expected dividend. Share prices didn't move that much, and trading shares took time and had fees attached. You could speculate on share price moves, and people did, but the primary source of income from holding shares was dividends.
Now it's the other way around. The primary source of gains from owing shares is speculation on the share price. Dividends are mostly ignored.
The result of this is that share prices move not on "how well is the company likely to do?" but on "what do we think the share price will do in the next couple of months (at most) [0]?". It all becomes hype and rumour and speculation. Shareholders only care about the price, so boards are incentivised to only care about the price. And so on down. Generating hype about what the company is going to do becomes more important than actually doing it (I exaggerate, but not by much). This then leads to the short-term-ism that we see, and the hot potato effect.
I think the answer would be to tax speculative profits. If you sell something for more than you bought it for, the government takes a cut. Specifically remove this from income tax calculations, because they have way too many loopholes, and make it more like VAT/GST; a tax payable at the point of the transaction. This would reduce the profits from speculation, and hopefully move the emphasis back onto dividends and longer-term thinking.
[0] and obviously, for some privileged traders, the next couple of milliseconds
While the importance of dividends has waned, we should still mention buybacks and liquidation. They still exist and buybacks especially are an important part of delivering shareholder value. Apple is a great example of returning about 4 times more in buybacks than dividends.
How would you feel about tax-disadvantaging buybacks?
I like Cory Doctorow's take on this [0], that this is basically defrauding the shareholders. It used to be illegal, it probably should be illegal again.
It's also unsustainable, in that you can only do this for so long before you've bought up all the open shares and there's so few remaining that your company is no longer effectively tradeable.
I don't know where this practice leads, but I don't think it's a place we want to go to. I suspect it'll be further concentration of capital into fewer hands. To the extreme, we end up with all the large companies doing this becoming effectively private, owned by a small group of folks rich enough to keep their holdings while everyone else sells out during the buybacks. That's not good.
They just return money to shareholders. The only material difference with dividends is the tax treatment. Even all the incentives are the same.
> It's also unsustainable, in that you can only do this for so long before you've bought up all the open shares and there's so few remaining that your company is no longer effectively tradeable.
> To the extreme, we end up with all the large companies doing this becoming effectively private, owned by a small group of folks rich enough to keep their holdings while everyone else sells out during the buybacks. That's not good.
You can tell your broker to automatically re-invest dividends for you.
Similarly, if you just don't sell when there's a buyback, you own more of the company afterwards. No one is forced to sell.
Btw, most companies (including Apple and Google) keep issuing shares to employees. Buying back some of them in the open market is just an indirect roundabout way of essentially handing employees cash.
Mr Doctorow's point is that the company is taking money from its operations, which it should be spending on expanding those operations and increasing its value, and spending that money on artificially inflating its share price, by effectively wash trading the shares, creating artificial demand, and artificially reducing supply.
If you bought shares in the company as a long-term position in order to receive dividends then you do not benefit from buybacks, and arguably lose out (because the money used on the buyback could have been distributed as a dividend). It only benefits short-term speculator shareholders. And, of course, the executives who are incentivised on share price, for whom a buyback is a much, much, easier way to get those incentives than actually doing their jobs and using the money to grow the company.
How is any of that fraud? Fraud doesn't just mean you have to disagree with something someone does, but you have to have been lied to.
> And, of course, the executives who are incentivised on share price, for whom a buyback is a much, much, easier way to get those incentives than actually doing their jobs and using the money to grow the company.
Companies can and should adjust the incentives so that the effect of dividends and buybacks are the same for the executive. (They already adjust for share splits for example.)
> If you bought shares in the company as a long-term position in order to receive dividends then you do not benefit from buybacks, and arguably lose out (because the money used on the buyback could have been distributed as a dividend).
Before you buy any shares, you should check what management says about their plans. At least, if you have specific expectations.
Even if buybacks were outlawed, companies aren't guaranteed to pay dividends. It's perfectly legal to never make a profit, or to give all your excess money to charity. You just have to tell your shareholders.
> Mr Doctorow's point is that the company is taking money from its operations, which it should be spending on expanding those operations and increasing its value, and spending that money on artificially inflating its share price, by effectively wash trading the shares, creating artificial demand, and artificially reducing supply.
Yeah, that's a stupid objection.
The substantial first half of it would equally well apply to dividends. (And the whole point of giving money to companies as an investor is that eventually you are getting more back.)
The second half is just not how any of this works. Does he even know what a wash trade is? And what's 'artificial' about this?
Buybacks and dividends are financially equivalent. They give money from the company to shareholders. The incentives are exactly the same for all parties involved, too.
Their only material difference is in taxes. Yes, I am in favour of putting dividends and buy backs on the same tax footing, just in the name of simplicity. And while you are at it, also put dividends and interest payments on the same tax footing.
At the moment, many jurisdictions advantage interest payments, thus encourage financing companies with debt instead of equity. And then they awkwardly pair it with other rules that try to tell companies (especially financial companies like banks) not to use so much debt, not to be so levered.
> Some theorists point out the obvious hack: take away the hot potato. Slow the game down. Make shares harder to flip, make earnings less frequent. If you could only trade stock once a year, you'd actually care what the company looks like in a year. If they only reported results annually, you'd be forced to think in years, not quarters.
Google's original founders still hold the majority of voting rights.
Making trading less efficient wouldn't change anything here.
> It's a tradeoff: you can have maximum liquidity and hyper-efficient capital markets, but then you get short-term brain damage. Or you can slow the game down, but then you're basically asking people to trust managers more and accept worse capital efficiency.
No, your proposal wouldn't work at all.
A big problem is actually that most managers in most companies mostly work for themselves. It's called a 'principal/agent problem'.
Exactly as you say 'execs get more room to bullshit.'
Btw, there's private equity funds with very long capital lock-ups. Their effects on companies typically aren't loved by the people who voice similar concerns to yours.
AT&T eventually gave up and agreed to divest of the RBOCs because they didn't like their chances with the regulators. Imagine a Big Tech company having so little faith today in their ability to manipulate the government between lobbying, campaign contributions, and the most modern and economical play, stroking the President's ego.
The same way any tech company works now: use investor money to offer things for free or unrealistically cheap until you corner the market, and once your competitors are no longer relevant you start milking every buck you can.
The founders of the company still have a controlling stake in the business. External shareholders have little leverage.
Going public gave Google a lot of nearly-free money to grow, and it's how you've gotten both Gmail and Google+. But more importantly, it allowed them to offer much higher total comp packages by issuing more stock on the go. I think they're prisoners of the stock market only insofar that if the stock stops going up, they're gonna have a harder time hiring and retaining talent.
In a way, it's the employees holding the company hostage. They're simultaneously complaining about innocence lost and stating their implicit preference for this outcome by demanding top-of-the-line comp.
If you want to be paid the same as at Microsoft or Facebook, you become Microsoft or Facebook.
> Going public gave Google a lot of nearly-free money to grow, and it's how you've gotten ... Gmail
And in retrospect, was that really a good thing? Short-term, yes - I remember how much better it was than the alternatives. Long-term, we ended up in a situation where email = GMail for most users, and this in turn gives Google undue leverage and strangles competition.
Nope, there were no ads at the beginning. It was a big deal when they announced AdWords. And the ads were unobtrusive and often quite useful at the beginning.
Google was quite vocal about clearly marking ads, in contrast to Overture, Yahoo, and others who mixed ads into search results in the late 90s / early 2000s. I think the period when Google lightened, then entirely removed the colored background that made it easy to identify ads was an inflection point in their fall from being a company that genuinely focused on users towards becoming just another megacorp run by profit-maximizing MBAs.
No, they had no ads for several years. AdWords were introduced in 02000, at which point Google had existed (initially as google.stanford.edu) for four years, since 01996, which was 40% of the amount of time the Web had even existed. I started using Google in probably 01998, when people on Slashdot got excited about how much better their search quality was than AltaVista, but it probably wasn't until 01999 that I switched over completely—at first AltaVista still had better coverage.
Not at the very beginning. But when they first added ads, they were clearly marked in the top with a yellow background (and they didn't take over the whole page), and on the righthand column (and they were clearly marked as sponsored links).
I'd have to dredge it up but someone put up a site that showed the visual changes to ads over the past 15 years, and they've become more and more indistinguishable from organic search results, and they've taken over more of the page.
A great visual history of enshittification, and also how "growth at all costs" capitalism leads to that enshittification. Google was still taking in money hand over fist in the mid 00s when they had a few, clearly marked ads, but capitalism demands the line arcs upwards no matter what.
My memory says that wasn't such a big selling point. When Google first came out it blew all other search engines away in terms of result quality.
If, back then, Yahoo and Altavista were minimalist and Google was a garish nightmare of ads and flashing gifs and nested banners and affiliate buttons, I would still have happily used it for the results.
Google's search interface is still reasonably clean IMO. Nowhere near its minimal best. Yes there are ads and "sponsored results" and shopping frames and all that crap, but they really aren't everything that's wrong with Google Search.
Quality of results and inability to specify queries beyond vague suggestions are the worst things.
I don’t have an image to prove it, but I remember google making it a point and bragging of having clearly differentiated ads (in pale yellow I think?).
It was a big contrast and a signal of classy goodwill, back in the age of replicating popups and garish blinking text.
Exactly this. I remember when it was just a couple small links in a yellow banner you could scroll past. Same with YouTube, the ads used to just be a banner under or beside the video but didn't interfere with the main content.
Once the ads got invasive, I installed ublock and haven't looked back. I don't feel the slightest bit guilty about that.
Of course it was the quality of the search results thanks to the algorithm (Page Rank) that at the time was unmatched and amazingly resilient, compared to the competition, against the primitive SEO tactics of the day (key word spamming etc.).
However, the lean interface without blinkentags and ads was definitely a selling point. Also, IIRC, the guarantee that you'd only get sites that actually contained all the words in your search query (that feature is long gone, too, of course).
I guess it depends how you define "selling point" exactly.
The interface and speed were great, no doubt. Did you ever encounter another search engine that produced similar or better results that you otherwise would have used, but Google's interface sold you? I never did, so it wasn't a selling point for me.
For me at least, it wasn't that either. It was the quality of the results.
I would have put up with slow bloated adware Google results of early 2000s, compared to fast minimal sleek interface with results of Yahoo/Altavista/anything else I tried.
The results were good. I remember admitting that for many things I really could have used 'I'm Feeling Lucky' and bypass the SERP entirely, but I disliked relinquishing that much control, so I never made a habit of it. Today I don't think I could trust it much of the time.
I'm not sure what you are unclear about, but yes I was re-emphasizing my point for you.
There were lots of "differentiators" that did not really matter, including speed. The differentiator was result quality, not how or when they were presented.
Yes. Altavista and Metacrawler worked really well. Google managed to be just a little bit leaner and faster still. They probably did start to have a bigger index at some point, though.
Even when they first turned on ads, it was arguably a net win. I worked AdWords tech-support 2005-2008, and sat in on the “Ads Quality” core team meeting.
They basically had this big money dial, and rather than crank it to 11, they were fiercely protective of the core user experience.
They kept ads mostly to the side (unobtrusive), only served them on queries where there was a high probability of commercial intent, and only promoted ads above organic results if the predicted CTR was extremely high.
I remember being delighted more than once when the ad system surfaced the product I wanted when organic results did not.
Now…? You get all spam above the fold.
The Ads Quality PM back then was Nick Fox, who I just learned became SVP for ads and search last year. Which means he is at least indirectly responsible for the OP. Not entirely sure what to make of that.
I remember when Google Maps allowed you to enter "*" as the only search term, and you'd see every business in the area. Not just a portion of those who had paid for placement. Those were the days...
I knew larry and sergei socially when they were grad students. I completely believe that when they started that was a genuine sentiment. I wonder at what point they realized personally that that was gone
I'm old enough to remember when the web didn't exist ... and when I dumped Altavista and Ask Jeeves and co for the cool kids: Google.
I'm fucking livid. Well actually: mildly unimpressed. The cool kids rarely last as such and "do no evil" ended up behind a green tent and a single shot was heard.
Actually, I am slightly stressed over this whole thing.
Grand daughter is rocking a customer cast off laptop. I was asked for help when the first lock down for covid was announced in the UK. I slapped on Kubuntu and an OpenVPN connection back to my home pfSense router on it, so I could manage it. All a bit slapdash but best I could do at the time.
That was 2020. Six months ago, I find out she is still using it and its a "bit slow". I update it from 18.04 to 24.04 via ssh over an OpenVPN connection on the box itself. Its still in use and is still attached to both one of my home OpenVPN servers and my work Mesh Central.
I've also recently repurposed another Win10 but can't do Win11 laptop to someone so they can do some courses.
I think I'm doing all right with supporting the next cool kids.
lol, I meant a different search engine. This is awesome though, you’re definitely helping those kids out a lot. You should think about giving them sudo and making them manage the upgrade themselves too though, to push them into learning more. A 7yo might be able to handle that but 10+ definitely.
With what kind of assurance that history won't repeat itself? If anything, the rate at which companies enshittify has increased. Instead of taking 10 years now it takes more like 3 (or less).
Life is change. Sometimes that’s worth fighting for and sometimes it’s worth fighting against. Is the current Google worth that battle for you? I’d rather see what comes next.
And yet they always knew that ad-supported business is going mean enshittification. Kagi website has this epic quote from the original Google paper to drive the point home:
"The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users... advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."
— The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998
