Technology

59598 readers

3360 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

549

The Man Who Killed Google Search (www.wheresyoured.at)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/technology@lemmy.world

135 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Edward Zitron has been reading all of google's internal emails that have been released as evidence in the DOJ's antitrust case against google.

This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it.

The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google properties, had called a “code yellow” for search revenue due to, and I quote, “steady weakness in the daily numbers” and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind.

HackerNews thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976

MetaFilter thread: https://www.metafilter.com/203456/The-core-query-softness-continues-without-mitigation

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] jqubed@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

There’s an awful lot of things where if the incentives were to keep paying users happy instead of keeping advertisers happy we would see very different results from the service. Unfortunately, for an awful lot of these services people don’t want to pay for them, or at least don’t want to pay what it costs to make them financially viable.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

The high cost of housing is squeezing people all over the globe and we're seeing a spike in homelessness in first-world countries from USA to Australia, where the affordability of housing is out of control, on top of explosive inflation of food costs.

It may not be that they "don't want to pay" but simply not enough people have enough discretionary income to pay enough to make the business financially viable.

I mean, that's what happened to Beeper and while I was a very early on their sign up list I decided to never give them any money. When it became clear they weren't able to keep things going on how much money they were making from paying users: Micigovsky sold to a larger company.

I think it's an issue that the services they're offering actually cost more than the market is actually effectively able to bear and they're trying to hide that fact with advertising and data sales to cover operating costs.

More simply put: Consumers don't actually have enough money anymore to be able to support a business, and businesses essentially now must rely on other businesses as customers to be able to functionally exist financially. Only other businesses have the finances to support new business.