This take only makes sense if you don’t know what people use Google search for. If you’re looking for your local Ford dealership, or to book a Carnival cruise, or need a disability lawyer, or to refinance your credit card debt, you’re searching for an ad. You’re not using Chat-GPT for that. You’re asking Chat-GPT about a research project. It’s stealing away all the hard to monetize searches and leaving the incredibly lucrative searches.

Your narrative depressed Google’s stock price for years, and bears finally gave up since they kept coming out with huge earnings beats.

Search is now only 50% of the revenue. But sure keep the myth going.

That’s over half of their business, but they do have some diversification with YouTube, Play Store, and cloud services.

Some of their newer efforts like Waymo and AI hosting for Apple could turn into large businesses to make up for any lost search revenue.

They also have significant costs to maintain their search revenue, such as $20B a year to Apple alone to make Google the default search engine in Safari.

If search becomes less lucrative, they would presumably pay less for such deals.

So yeah, definitely a time of disruption for Google and they need to keep moving fast on many fronts, but they are still well positioned in multiple markets to be successful.

If by "shakier footing" you mean accelerating growth in query volume, ad impressions, revenue and earnings, I'll take it.

I disagree

A model serves a different purpose from a web crawler.

I'd prefer to be able to find source material over steering a model I have no control over while managing hallucinated outputs without the ability to fact check.

Just because it sourced some materials using RAG doesn't make its outputs valid, accurate, or factual.

> which is now on much shakier footing

Is it though? As far as I can tell they continue to maintain total domination of web search, and LLMs do not replace search engines, they work on top of them.

used to be. Cloud, Waymo, and some other bets have been paying off.

And yet, their search engine is enshittified beyond all belief.

Not so much hardware these days, about half of IBM's revenue comes from software (Red Hat related stuff alone probably brings in a ton), and about 20% comes from consulting

It’s a trustworthy name for enterprises. Many executives are old enough that IBM was the Google of their time when they started their careers.

Yeah, I should have said growing not going. That's what I meant.

It ought to be extremely easy now to use LLMs to transpile cobol and do the necessary reverse engineering to migrate off mainframes and aix servers. I think IBM will lose many customers.

IBM had something of a downward blip last quarter, partly because of mainframe cycles. But it's actually done generally well the past few years and pays a pretty good dividend. $10B in net income for 2025 isn't shabby.

LLMs rewriting legacy code in newer languages is going to have an impact.

apples to oranges comparison. 1990 is early days for MS. 1990 is gorilla days for IBM.