Just read this article that says google paid apple $20B to be their search provider and then next to it in "new" is an article saying how big the economic impact of the fitness industry is at $22B. https://www.ihrsa.org/improve-your-club/the-fitness-industry...
When you see numbers it does make you wonder if the premise the Subprime Attention Crisis (Tim Hwang) is much more realistic than we think.
But when you think about the amount of industries advertising covers, it might still be tame. Hard to tell from the outside and even the inside on this until it is in the rear view mirror.
My interactions with Google products remind me of 90's Microsoft. They are so rich and so well protected by their de facto monopoly that they institutionally give no F**s.
Example: In 2024, I have to go into my AdWords account daily and prevent them from adding irrelevant search terms they decide I should use to eat up my PPC budget. At best, that's user-hostile, if not outright theft.
I pay openAI $20 a month as a user and another $2.5K for their API for our business, and if I could put a memo in the payments, it would be FGooG. I don't think OpenAI is any better, but I'm ready for some new flavor of corruption.
Google is eventually going to have to pay for decades of user-hostile behavior. They just aren't loved; there is no stored-up goodwill there, which means if someone else has a better mousetrap, they die. Programmatically letting companies bid against each other for their Yellow Pages listing clearly is the most lucrative business model in the history of the Earth, but let's see what's next.
One major difference is the incentives indirection. Google's revenue comes from ads, not end-user software, whereas the Microsoft of the '90s was much more directly connected to their users. So I'm not sure which is worse for the user, but it seems like it could make Google's situation worse because the signals they get from their "users" aren't necessarily the highest priority. Up to a certain threshold, enragement is engagement which is a positive short term signal for an ads company, with potentially bad long term consequences.
The third section of the linked content argues for the possibility that, instead of search getting worse, the internet has gotten worse faster than search is getting better. I haven't seen that take elsewhere and it seems unlikely but still useful to consider.
Have any of you seen this interpretation elsewhere? Does this theory have a name?
I think it depends on what ways "worse" means. For me, when I'm in my HN bubble, I get to see a lot of websites that are plain, easy to navigate and read. It's a great experience. Outside of my bubble is where it's "worse". I'm inundated with newsletter signups, way too many ads, and a whole lot of fluff SEO and AI based writing, autoplaying videos that follow as I scroll down a page even if it's not playing. Not to mention the frequent paywalls/account necessary sites that seem to be everywhere. There's a consignment e-shop I found one day that required an account to see product info and prices. Thankfully, there are extensions to block a lot of that stuff, but I dont think it should have to be that way.
I don't know about a name for this phenomena, but it is a growing concern, at least for me.
As for the rest of the google search stuff, I started paying for search and it's been the best experience so far.
Except... I find I get more useful results from bing, ddg, kagi than I do from Google. (Not great results, but reliably less contaminated with pure junk.) Obviously, my personal search habits aren't going to match those of everyone else, but a year ago this was not the case.
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