Google’s “market” isn’t search, it’s “selling ads” and capturing attention (mostly YouTube). Google is under assault in ad selling by Facebook who knows more about you and Amazon (same disclaimer I work at AWS) who knows your buying habits.
You also can’t block Amazon and Facebook ads.
On the YouTube side, you have TikTok that is becoming more competitive for attention and maybe Twitch (???)
Amazon makes most of its profits from AWS. It’s also making plenty of money these days from advertising.
Who gives Google money and what do they give Google money for?
When I was working for B2B companies, our “customers” were the IT department and the companies. Our customers weren’t the end users. We tried our best to make the software easy for the end users. But we marketed to the CxOs and made sure they were happy.
In the case of Amazon Retail. They (we) have to convince the customer to give us money in exchange for goods and services.
>In the case of Amazon Retail. They (we) have to convince the customer to give us money in exchange for goods and services.
Right, and Google needs to convince users to love the products and continue using them, so that ads can be shown, and maybe even despite ads being shown.
I have noticed a strong sentiment against paying for products even here on HN where the average user probably makes quite a bit of money. People would rather block ads than pay for YouTube Premium, for example. It shows me that ads are actually a pretty good business model because if "wealthy" people won't pay for products, less wealthy people definitely won't.
Maybe we're seeing different things but I do not mind it at all. It is exactly what I would expect for such a broad query. In fact, I was prepared to see way worse things.
It sucking less than all other alternatives is a pretty good reason to like it. There is a lot of vested interest in good search engines and the fact that no competitors, even from behemoths like Microsoft, have been able to do any better shows that it's a hard problem to solve.
I think a lot of people are naturally resistive to change and are stuck in the past when the web was simple and 10 links was all it took. Nowadays, the web is so complex that it's nearly impossible to tell what you want to see off a broad query. In my experience, it guesses very well and the complaints about Search having gotten worse are really complaints about the Internet as a whole having gotten worse. What used to be dedicated websites are now uncrawlable pages on a large company's website (e.g. Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, etc). I personally like all of the "onebox" results that don't require me to go elsewhere -- search has become much faster for me in that way.
I actually really don't like Amazon's retail site. It's complex and it's not clear why I see so many repeated identical items as separate listings. One a single listing, I can choose alternative sellers than the default. Is that linking to other listings or is still the same listing? Who knows. It hasn't changed or improved in decades.
You also can’t block Amazon and Facebook ads.
On the YouTube side, you have TikTok that is becoming more competitive for attention and maybe Twitch (???)