Google are really firing on all cylinders recently. It's almost shocking to read all they've done in the last year.
The fact they caught up with OpenAI you almost expect. But the Nobel winning contributions to quantum computing, the advances in healthcare and medicine, the cutting edge AI hardware, and the best in class weather models go way beyond what you might have expected. Google could have been an advertising company with a search engine. I'm glad they aren't.
>>Google could have been an advertising company with a search engine. I'm glad they aren't.
>They kind of are though?
Splitting[1] is a psychological phenomena that you'll find often once you learn to recognize it. Google can both be doing great research, and run a significant influence operation.
This antinomical understanding (contradictory opposites that are both true) has its origins in Kant's work[0], which was of course picked up by Freud, consciously or not.
Its not "good in some ways and bad in others," its the idea that every action is fully mechanical and that every action is fully freely determined can both be argued to be true within the laws of cognition, even if they are completely opposed to one another.
This may be of interest to you, a few years before Kant with “Syādvāda” going beyond the binary implied by contradiction alone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekantavada
A big part of what makes Google Search awful is just the usual SEO shitters, trying their hardest to rig the game on any search result that's anywhere close to common or profitable.
Google's main failing there is that they don't put enough effort into their search to keep up with that, and fail to raise the bar on garbage content and search engine manipulation.
LLM output in search results I'm not against. Do you need to open an entire website to learn how to sort an array in JavaScript with a lambda function? For many of the more common and more trivial requests, LLM output is well in "good enough".
>Do you need to open an entire website to learn how to sort an array in JavaScript with a lambda function?
That's exactly what Google is implying, isn't it?
By placing a redirect to an LLM at the top, and following it with bad search results, Google is saying "don't bother with the web, asking an LLM is better".
It is a very shortsighted thing to say, as a company whose moat and expertise is search. Particularly so when LLMs aren't yet proved to be a viable path to profit and there are other players in the game.
Their basic model is a user asks a question and they put up results along with some ads. Maybe it doesn't matter so much if the results are page rank search or LLMs?
Google had two choices, and one of them was "bury your head in sand and hope this entire LLM thing goes away". They weren't dumb enough to take that choice.
I don't think it's already clear which is the dumb choice.
LLMs are clearly a useful product, I'm not arguing that. That's not sufficient for being the new Search.
To be the new Search, they also need LLMs to be performant enough to be profitable. And yet, stay unperformant enough that it isn't feasible to run them locally. And they have to stay useful long term, after the web is flooded by slop or content dries up because people stopped consuming the web directly. And a monetisation path needs to be found and survive legislation.
But more importatntly, it's not A or B. Gemini could have been pushed without sacrificing their golden-egg goose for the cause.
They probably care more about purging SEO slop. But, also, Kagi has a total of 4 active users. Which means they don't have a SEO target the size of the entire Internet painted on their backs.
There isn't a small army of adversarial SEO sloptimizers eager to skirt the rules or bypass whatever Kagi does to purge SEO spam and downrank content mills.
So Google are trying lots of things to improve their search results but don't have the ability to out-think the spammers? That sounds like what you're saying?? Any evidence?
It seems like they know how to improve (their offerings were way better in the past for me) but have moved to optimise for advertising revenue. IMO they've gone too far, they'll crash out of search in the next couple of years and won't be able to backtrack fast enough to keep their users.
Then they won't have cash to burn to fund the other [moonshot?] projects.
It feels like when VCs buy a company, coast on the name whilst stripping away all that made that name bankable; then they eventually run it into the ground, latch on to the next victim and on, and on. Except here Google are leeching off themselves.
>but don't have the ability to out-think the spammers
Out thinking everyone else is very hard. The number of enterprises by spammers these days may exceed legitimate data being put on the internet. Much in the same way attempted spam far exceeded non-spam emails years ago.
At the same time who is even close to providing the services google provides?
I'm saying that out-thinking the spammers consistently takes actual effort, and a lot of it, applied continuously. Google isn't willing to put that much effort in.
A big part of what makes Google awful is that they are a monopoly across multiple domains. They have used extremely anticompetitive tactics, and the regulatory bodies have been asleep at the wheel.
Google owns search, the internet browser, and every point of ingress for the average person.
They transformed the URL bar into a search bar as a way to intercept everyone's thought process and turn it into the largest internet tax in the world.
Brands that spend millions or billions to establish themselves now have to competitively bid on their own established trademarks, because anyone can swoop in and put ads in front.
Google designed the results page such that the top results are what 99% of people click on. Google search is effectively an internet toll on every business.
They own the browsers, they own the HTML spec, they control the web.
To think this doesn't increase costs for consumers dramatically is absurd. This is a tax on all of us.
Not only do they do that, but they also starve informational businesses and news businesses of traffic by stealing their content and showing visitors first. The people that work to build the content are getting stiffed.
Google has tried so many times to kill websites and bring the entire Internet under their control. There was a time when not having a Google-controlled AMP website meant you didn't rank at all. Your content lived in their walled garden. Then Google coerced you to bear their network's ads.
Google has destroyed businesses and entire careers by being allowed to do this.
Don't get me started on mobile. While it's a duopoly, both market participants are subjecting all commerce and all participants to the same Gestapo regime. Everything is taxed, tightly regulated, and kept under thumb. The two titans constantly grab more surface area. I could spend an hour outlining the evils here too.
Google needs to be broken up. Not as one would expect into multiple business divisions (though this would also be wise), but instead into multiple copies of the same business that are forced to compete and stripped of certain business tactics.
This is what we did for Ma Bell. Google is way worse.
I'm glad 95% of URL bars don't just default to Google Search and immediately get hit by ad bidding war taxes. Would certainly suck if you had a well-recognized brand and just wanted your customers to access your website through the URL bar.
72% Chrome --> Google
15% Safari --> Google
5% Edge --> Bing
2% Firefox --> Google
2% Opera --> Google
...
This alone implies a divestiture of Chrome should be in the cards.
Or maybe Google would be so kind to remove queries with URL bar origination from ad sales if there's a registered trademark (within some edit distance) within the query?
In mobile I have been upset by the way AOSP is being deprioritised by Google and the fact they've increasingly moved features into Google play services.
In the browser space I'm pleased that Firefox exists but they are so dependent on Google that they barely qualify as competitors.
In the search space though,
competition is heating up for the first time. LLMs are a good alternative to a web search for many types of questions and Google is far from the only player here. Open AI, Anthropic, etc are competitors to Google. They are competing with Google in a way which Yahoo and Bing never really managed.
Anyway I do very much agree that Google enjoys multiple monopolies and that they shouldn't. My point is that with so much easy money out there it's refreshing to see them continuing to innovate. They don't really need to.
Thing thing that gets me about people who complain about google (generally, not in just the tech bubble), is that 95% of the people complaining have used Google for decades, maybe even spending 2% of their waking life using a Google product...
and have never paid Google a single penny for anything.
That's why Google is so dominant. That's why they are so skilled at data collection. The built a system that converts user data into dollars, so users don't have to pay. And users love, absolutely love, like their first born child and high school sweetheart combined into one, not having to pay for things.
Google is not the reason google sucks. People's unwillingness to compensate for services they use is. And before you comment with how you use Kagi, and Nebula, and Patreon. Yes, thank you. You are in the <0.1% of internet users who get it.
Maybe not directly but if hotels and the like have to pay 15% of their turnover to Google for ads to get visitors, either directly or via booking.com etc, then you end up paying that when you stay there.
That kind of stuff is where Google's billions come from.
Government is not the solution, government is the problem. There is no such thing as a healthy functioning regulatory body - they all regulate too much and some should not exist. Don't call your legislator because the most dangerous words in the English language are, "I'm from the goevrnment and I'm here to help."
Well by not opening the blog post or whatever page that nicely explains the JavaScript sort with examples, you just deprived them of page views and probably income. So what will happen in 5 years when you’re searching for human written and thoughtful content on something more complex and all you get is slop?
You haven't really been getting 'human written and thoughtful content' for a vast swath of search topics for probably 15-20 years now. You get SEO-hyper-optimized (probably LLM-generated for anything in the last 3 years) blog spam. In terms of searching for information and getting that information, there are a lot of topics where an LLM-generated result is vastly better just by virtue of not being buried inside blog spam. The slop ship sailed years ago.
No we don’t need to open an entire website to learn x simple thing. However we DO need meaningful competition among information providers. I am not looking forward to the enshittification phase of AI.
- Their main source of revenue seems to be decaying, as if the talent that made it great isn't there anymore. Few people would tell you that search (or maps, or youtube) is better today than it ever was.
- Talent is there, and the quality of their moonshots is proof.
Early days are where you can move the needle the most. It's hard to make an impact on a huge, entrenched business that works pretty well and has millions of stakeholders.
It’s not like there isn’t precedent, monopoly power and total market dominance has frequently turned into world beating research centers. Bell labs being the most obvious, but xerox parc and others have come and gone over the last century.
Google has been actively trying to diversify away from being dependent on just ads for a very long time. The other ventures are certainly not side projects in terms of investment, and pretending revenue sources are equivalent to the only source of motivation is over simplifying how large companies operate.
Hot take: they have always been firing on all cylinders. The marketing it just a bit different now. Everything you mention is the result of significant long-term investments.
I’m pretty sure they’re keeping that as ‘research’ to avoid other teams from getting involved and suffering the same fate. I think Jax is pretty neat but haven’t had the chance to use it in anger.
I think we should start separating discussion of “The Economy” from “human prosperity and wellbeing.” Because they are essentially two different things, only slightly related.
The Economy can grow wildly while normal people are poor, suffering, and barely holding it together. I don’t care if corporations are doing great or if the GDP is high, if everything I need costs 3X what it used to and Im not sure if I’ll be employed next week.
While you are probably right in that The Economy, technically is growing, it doesn’t feel like it to normal people I know.
> I think we should start separating discussion of “The Economy” from “human prosperity and wellbeing.”
Do you think Americans' prosperity and wellbeing is tanking?
We can still look at quantitative and qualitative data.
The Economist ran a story in July "What is the richest country in the world in 2025"[1] in which they compared economies in three different ways: GDP per person at market exchange rates, Adjusted for price differences, and Adjusted for prices and hours worked.
Against those three metrics, the US is ranked in 4th, 7th, and 6th positions.
Even these statistics may need further interpretation or further adjustment (the article does a great job explaining why adjustments are needed for places like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Ireland, Luxembourg).
> While you are probably right in that The Economy, technically is growing, it doesn’t feel like it to normal people I know.
Pew's research shows that most Americans rate the US economy negatively, with a strong partisan divide. 44% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents rat the economy as excellent or good (up 8 points from April) while only 10% of Democrats and Democratic-leaners say so.
Arguments for "better off" than, say, 3 years ago: strong job market, economic growth, reduced debt burden.
Arguments for "worse off" than, say, 3 years ago: high cost of living.
Notwithstanding the pessimism and the visible fact that people are not as economically strong as a pre-pandemic (but certainly much more than 2007 - 2008), I don't know that I would say the US economy is "tanking" OR that Americans are becoming destitute.
I don't have access to read the article, but I wonder if they are looking at the median or the average. Averages don't tell the complete story like distributions do. When you just measure averages, a room with 1 person who has $10M plus 9 people who have nothing has the same prosperity as a room with 10 millionaires.
Thank you. It’s driving me crazy that everyone is just pointing to research and numbers, partly manufactured numbers at that. Go outside and talk to a few real people and see how they’re fairing maybe…
While consumer debt is at or near historical highs, it is in and of itself not a problem (broader economic risk).
What you need to look at as well is debt burden ratios and repayment behavior, not just raw totals.
Household debt service ratio (the share of disposable income spent on principal + interest payments) is well below historical crisis peaks (e.g., 2007–2008), suggesting households are currently spending a smaller share of income on debt payments than in past stress periods.
While total household debt is at record levels (~$18 trillion+), debt as a share of income or GDP has not reached past crisis peaks like 2008.
That means debt growth hasn’t outpaced income growth as dramatically as in previous crises.
However, delinquency rates, especially for credit cards and student loans, are elevated, nearing or exceeding long-run highs outside recessions.
Mortgage delinquency rates remain lower than unsecured debt categories, but have ticked up slightly. Because they're relatively stable, it mutes broader systemic risk for now.
"The percentage of subprime borrowers – those with credit scores below 670 – who are at least 60 days late on their car loans has doubled since 2021 to 6.43%, according to Fitch Ratings. That’s worse than during the past three recessions – during the Covid pandemic, the Great Recession or the dot-com bust."
"America’s current subprime delinquency rate is at the second-highest level since the early 1990s. The only time it was higher: this past January. Cars are being repossessed at the highest rate since the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009."
It is nonetheless true that to interpret such a chart as the one the GP posted you must at least mentally discount it for both population (which is +11% since 2008, the last consumer credit calamity) and the value of dollars (which are now ~67¢ vs. 2008). Debt service as fraction of HH income is in some ways easier to interpret.
Anyway, even clicking through to the PDF linked from GP's front page shows that every metric of US consumer credit is at or near all-time bests.
The old problem with metrics like GDP, is that they consider the whole but not the parts, it is kinda saying that I and Musk have billions in wealth, but I am in debt.
> The old problem with metrics like GDP, is that they consider the whole but not the parts, it is kinda saying that I and Musk have billions in wealth, but I am in debt.
Does this mean you also think that "the (US) economy is tanking" OR do you agree with me that the economy is NOT tanking?
He saying that using a single metric like GDP isn't sufficient for claiming that the economy isn't tanking. The economy != GDP. For many regular people, it's terrible right now.
See my other comments in this thread that surfaces other metrics like: debt burden ratios, repayment behavior, GDP per person at market exchange rates, Adjusted for price differences, and Adjusted for prices and hours worked.
I'm not saying that Americans aren't under more economic strain than a few years ago (pre-pandemic), excluding 2007 - 2008.
However, I think if someone is going to claim the economy is tanking OR that Americans are fast becoming destitute or something extreme like that, you gotta give some quantitative data to back up that claim.
Those metrics are all aggregate ones. A group containing Bill Gates plus one destitute homeless person $1M in debt has great metrics of that sort. Total debt is a tiny fraction of total income. Income per person is huge, and doesn't stop being huge when you adjust for price differences or hours worked or anything else you care to adjust for. But that destitute homeless person with a $1M debt is still destitute and homeless and $1M in debt.
I haven't commented on "repayment behaviour" because your other comments don't actually mention that. Maybe there's something behind one of the links you posted that explains what you mean by it. I did have a quick look at the not-paywalled ones and didn't see anything of the kind.
(The above isn't a claim that actually the US economy is in a very real sense tanking, or that not-very-rich Americans are heading for destitution, or anything else so concrete. Just pointing out why the things you've been posting don't seem like they address the objection being made.)
One thing I've learned in this near half century on this Earth...
People always think the economy is tanking. I've heard "not in this economy" as an excuse every single year of my adult life. In retrospect, even in the boom years.
If you look at all quarters in a chart it's not substantially different from the patterns we saw last year. We're just 2 quarters from when we posted a GDP contraction 1% lower YOY (this quarter is 1% higher YOY).
I'm not sure that the rest of the economy really is "tanking" but OK. Are you implying it's distasteful to discuss success from a big company in such dark times?
Google could really easily be a purely rent seeking business but they are innovating, and if you are worried about the economy then this should seem like good news.
You don’t believe the recent economic numbers? I’m not disagreeing with you, just curious about other takes (and generally very skeptical of funny money printer go burrr economic things vs real economy meaning real output).
There has been a lot of discussion on this recently in the blog-o-sphere. All conclusions I've seen so far are that the economy is basically fine and maybe people's expectations have risen (I'm oversimplifying). I'm also quite eager to hear different conclusions, because there is a lot of cognitive dissonance on the economy right now.
There's definitely an aspect of rising expectations (e.g., everyone and their dog having a late-model smartphone). There's also an aspect where some of that is mostly unavoidable (e.g., accessing my HSA now requires a very late-model smartphone -- something I can avoid complying with for now by just finding a better place to transfer my money, but it's a worrying trend -- to achieve the same QoL as in the early 2000s I have mandatory nontrivial overhead).
It's really not just that though. A lot goes into it, but one observation is that the relative increases in wages and prices isn't distributed evenly. Some examples:
- A lot of people are legitimately substantially better off than they would have been a few decades ago. I literally never have to worry about money anymore when thinking about our purchases (for everything but a house with a big yard, which we still can't safely [0] afford without moving). I'm not alone.
- That's not true of everyone, even my next-door neighbors. I know people splitting a studio apartment and still struggling a bit. They have good jobs, and even splitting the apartment their post-tax, post-rent pay is $7.20/hr. That's fine enough I suppose, but they'll literally never be able to save for a home of any quality in the area in their entire lives using only a single income. It'll take them awhile to afford a home anywhere.
- Suppose you have a couple young kids. That places hard bounds on how much money you need to make even for childcare to make sense to get up to two incomes in the first place. I've known plenty of people with PhDs and good jobs who quit to take care of the kids for financial reasons, supporting the household on just the higher-earner's pay.
- A lot of small towns haven't seen the same increase in wages as the rest of the country but have seen the increase in prices. My hometown saw an increase from $10/hr to $20/hr in what a great wage is over the last 25 years. CPI only went up 1.9x in that time, but the same caliber of house went up 3x, and the staples people used to eat (like ground beef) went up more than 3x as well. They're correctly observing that they have less take-home money (because of 3x increased rent), that take-home money doesn't go as far (they can't eat the same foods they could 25yrs ago), and it definitely doesn't go as far if you want to do something like save for a house (it's an extra 4+yrs of post-tax, post-rent income to pay for a house, assuming you could devote all of it to savings instead of groceries and whatnot).
I'm not sure exactly how to quantify who's struggling and why at a macroscopic level, but I guarantee they're real and that it's not just an increase in expectations.
[0] It depends on your relative risk levels, but if you're not convinced the gravy train will last forever and are concerned about locking up all your assets in a depreciating vehicle then you need to be a bit more frugle with your choice of home.
Not in my experience (I use them every day).
GPT 5.1 (now 5.2) is absolutely much more accurate for coding tasks. I think that 5.1. might even be better than gemini 3.
For PDF parsing and understanding, it's only anecdotal as it happened to me only once but Gemini was more accurate, that one time (a scientific paper).
Claude, when I was still subscribed to it, was in between gemini and GPT for code tasks.
But the UI was too buggy and it was a bit too limited with their capacity threshold.
The fact they caught up with OpenAI you almost expect. But the Nobel winning contributions to quantum computing, the advances in healthcare and medicine, the cutting edge AI hardware, and the best in class weather models go way beyond what you might have expected. Google could have been an advertising company with a search engine. I'm glad they aren't.