Google is just scared. Google has been scared since November 30, 2022.

Text search is fundamentally a deterministic problem, and squeezing it through a heavy non-deterministic, stochastic engine -- especially through a CoT LLM -- is inefficient from a first-principles algorithm design pov. Also, Google did great search before AI overviews using probabilistic linking and knowledge graphs.

I've been using DuckDuckGo's NoAI version as a fallback, and I've had great results so far; brings me back to the web I remembered growing up -- personal blogs, random forum discussions, and whatnot -- with just a fraction of the page bloat.

I say all this as a HUGE fan of Gemini, Gemma, and Antigravity.

Is it really devastation? It's not like Search shrinked, it's that everything else grew so much. Yes, the landscape is shifting, but Google now has multiple legs to stand on, which should be a good sign to investors.

The devastation in question is that their total revenue is up 25% over last year.

This isn't Google search diminishing; Google is serving more search results this year. This is their other ventures catching up to their oldest one.

Search revenue isn't down, both search revenue and overall Google revenue are up, it's just that search is a smaller portion of the total pie because Google Cloud is climbing faster.

Devastation? Are you and I reading the same financial reports?