Here's a graph with revenue in dollars by segment:
Second, is the geometric growth of Cloud cannibalizing their search teams, leading to less effort being put into sales. And so it’s not so much that demand is tapering off as that supply is being constrained as an opportunity cost. That $1m in salary nets more profit from Cloud than from Search.
If I type in the name of a company so that I can navigate to their website, and I have to scroll past my whole viewport of other companies bidding to be placed above where I'm trying to go, I learn it's faster for me to just type the website address into the bar instead of going via Google.
They designed a UX that made my life easier and caused me to form a habit, and then broke that UX for money causing me to form a new habit.
It's just one example of dozens, but the consequence is that I see 95% fewer Google ads than I used to. My guess I am on the leading edge (along with many others on this forum) of a wave of change of user behavior that spells pessimism for Google search revenue.
Yes, to an extent. There were three unfavorable circumstances other than AI eating into search: FX (major), the World Cup timing, end of de minimis exemption in EU.
The real trick is that they're pretty much the only relevant ads on the entire internet. That and they pretty much force companies into paying so that people that search specifically for that company actually see that company as the first result.
https://www.pasteboard.co/yCGoS8kxEy7Y.png
Google Cloud clearly on positive acceleration for revenue share.
[1]: As the page says,
- "Search" means "ads on Google Search and on other Google properties such as Gmail, Maps and Google Play"
- "Everything else" means "YouTube ads, subscriptions and devices, Google Network and Other Bets".
(Love the cheeky exponential right past the end of data at the end of a straight line.
Forecasting 501: forecasts say the boss is smart)
Why does it even need to keep going up anyway? Is 60 billion not enough?
I'm surprised GCP rev is growing so fast. Anecdotally, most devs I know still prefer AWS.
Everything else is “call for pricing” for all but the simplest use cases.
I wonder if one was actually useful, maybe I’d notice it?
The solution is to force ads upon you and hope that you accidentally click on one due to sensory overload. Or more ads.
Meaning that, due to and capitalist incentives and double-dipping from tech companies, what you're searching for may actually be what's advertised
So if you have a long-tail page ("obscure part number") then the only way to show it is buying an ad for it.
Does any of us have any insight in Google manipulating the world?
We weren’t aware of this.
The ad company we used notified us of this issue and gave us three days to fix it. Afterwards our click-through rate went from something like 3% to .25%.
Many of those "accidents" are not really accidents: I've seen two kinds of ways sites engineer those "accidents"
(1) many sites, like phys.org, have crowded and confusing layouts that try to trick you on clicking on an "x" or something to close an ad but really clicking on the ad, there's a lot of deniability on this on mobile where the touch accuracy is poor
(2) a few years back there were a lot of sites which seemed to always change the layout when you were trying to click on something in the sidebar, anandtech was one of the worst, i could swear they were watching the mouse events and predicting the click events. this stopped all of a sudden, could be Google put the smack-down on this behavior
The worst part is I've seen search other video sites that used to surface exact titles stop working around the same time. I'm not sure how to reliably find things I know are there anymore.
I thought it was just because they were forcing third tier Chinese knockoffs for everything I searched for. After a few months, I gave up completely. I now look for product reviews on YT, THEN go back to Amazon and search for exactly what I'm looking for. Even then? The search results are still jammed with cheap knockoffs.
Now I wonder what the median CPC is for part numbers (I’d guess very cheap), and which one is the most expensive (no idea, super curious).
Found it interesting that I’ve flipped my search tool usage in such a short time. I use models for most “searching” but then utilize Google Search as the last resort.
How is it good news?
Consumer searches for $FOO. $FOO does not show up in the search results.
At this point, the search is useless to users.
But when an algorithm does it, they go "wow such future"
Thankfully I never see any ads - ublock origin kills these off. That includes the horrible UI choices Google made on its search interface. A custom ublock origin rule filters away the pointless "others also searched for pink cats" while I was searching for epic skyscrapers. Evidently Google tries to link-lose me here, wasting my time.
What they’re doing now is just being a lot more overt about it, because they want to carve up their old cash cow to feed their AI ambitions before ChatGPT and Claude eat it up first.
So (in theory) advertisers will lower their bids if they're not getting the desired value from the clicks; and over time some will migrate budgets to other channels (like "influencers"? shudder ...).
I still believe large spenders already advertise on multiple channels and balance budgets based on performance.
Google has been sued for being a monopoly, and it's not because they're just really good. It's because there's basically no other market that hits any of the dollar costs.
advertisers decide which channel justifies.
They still bring 250B ads dollars to google search, meaning it provides more than 250B value to them,
That first price auction complain is bs, advertisers will just stop bidding $5 for top click and start bidding $1.1 in his example to hit their goals.
Course, they win anyway because I also pay for youtube premium to avoid seeing ads..
Feels like the world is becoming a split between people who can afford not to be the product and people who cannot.
I'm not a believer in Google search long term, but advertisers continue to pay because they still get value - even if Google increases prices.
Second sentence is empirically a complete lie.
Search volume is still growing, despite analysts asking on every call what Google is going to do about falling volume, and Google continuing to re-iterate: Search volume is still growing, as are clicks on ads.
I get it that everyone hates paying as much for clicks as they do now. You can hate it all you want. You can claim Google is lying about search volume and ads, but that would be massive securities fraud...
Haters gonna hate. It doesn't mean the king is dead.
im very far from dentistry
You basically have to say, everyone from the CEO/CFO, to the auditors, the financial analysts, the legal team, and all the way down are all lying and this random guy on Twitter is telling the truth. Sorry, not buying it.
Most people don't know this, but the Search Advertising auction is a black box. The advertiser just specifies a bid (the maximum they're willing to pay for a click); and the search engine promises that they will not pay more than that.
Here's a trick that Search Engines may (or may not, I plead the Fifth) use: the price an advertiser "i" who bid "bid_i" pays is bid_(i+1) * pctr_(i+1) / pctr_i where "pctr_(i+1)" is the predicted probability of click (pCTR) on the next lower ad; "pctr_i" is the predicted probability of click on the current ad.
Guess who calculates the pCTR? The Engine! In theory, if their pCTR calculations were 100% accurate, all advertisers would pay the minimum bid (which is typically $0.01)! Clearly, this is not desirable. So Engines juice the revenue by tweaking these pCTR values. Talk to anybody who works on auction mechanisms at a search engine, and you'll hear stories of how they tweaked these pCTR values.
Social media replies regularly confirm all kinds of nonsense.
And given all the replies to that post on Twitter, it sounds like it's true.
Yes I read the post (please refer to HN guidelines on asking if people read something) and didn't find anything worthwhile there which is why I mentioned what I did.
Posting here for others asking about lying/juicing since I'm rate limited.
~~~~~
Lying on financial statements is in fact illegal. Juicing implies that some number is being misrepresented as higher than it otherwise would be which is a form of lying and thus would be illegal.
Obviously there are some gray areas - "we changed how we measure this" or something along those lines can be considered "juicing" or just a matter of changing a calculation to make more sense, but the broad accusation is extraordinary and requires much more evidence than some random person on Twitter saying some things. As an investor in Google (individually and through ETFs) it has no bearing on any investment thesis I have because I don't care what random nobodies on the Internet say and neither should you.
I think the bigger concern is that earnings misses are very rare for GOOG, and historically they've been able to hit almost any target that Wall Street expects. Their past earnings misses were all related to major macroeconomic events (2020Q1, which was the COVID shutdowns, 2022 all year with inflation from COVID/Ukraine + rate hikes, and 2019Q3 with the taper tantrum from Fed rate hikes), and most of them were more in the 5% range. A 30% miss, particularly with slowing revenue growth in their core business despite almost full monetization of commercial queries, could indicate that the golden goose is disintegrating.
For that matter, GOOG has been extremely correlated with macroeconomic indicators since about 2018, which means investors in the rest of the stock market should probably watch out. It's likely we're already in recession but don't know it.
It's somewhat fake, as fake as last quarter's huge beat. It's basically due to their large share in SpaceX, which they have to mark to market at the end of the quarter. Anyway, that's not at all the reason for the freakout.
which exactly earning number missed by 30%?..
OI isn’t more “actual” than EPS. I remember back when Yahoo traded for less than cash and liquids [1] because investors didn’t trust management not to blow it on stupid shit.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/business/dealbook/how-to-...
that's not ground truth in environment when landscape (AI) dramatically changes every quarter, and investments are uncertain bets with huge win potential.
Your ground truth metrics are: 1. How healthy core business: operating income. 2. How aggressively company reinvest: net - operating income.
Does that mean the e-mails are decryptable by the company? That wasn't my understanding of Proton's business model, especially between Proton accounts where I thought they were supposed to be Zero Access Encryption, which is supposedly public key crypto (being asymmetric encryption).
I don't have the imagination right now to figure out how you'd back-encrypt with stronger encryption unless it were symmetric.
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.
not really... search was great in 2008 or 2014, but not in 2022. seo spammers won by then, and their writing was even worse than opus 5.
I remember that the sites google shown before were sites you could get lost in. often they were communities. often they were sites actually written by an enthusiast of a subject.
these sites died. I wonder whether google was the victim or the culprit. the death of these sites did end up making their product worse. however, any site that actually hooked you meant less ad revenue for google. google wants you to come back from the result, since that's a second chance for you to click the ad. a result you come back from however is inherently a bad result.
Example search: video card game with the robot guy
AI overview [correct]: The video card game you are thinking of is likely Inscryption, which features a mysterious, robotic-looking or masked scrybe (like P03, the robot scrybe of technology)
>LLMs designed and deployed properly are infinitely better at this than keyword search engines are, despite being less predictable.
In what way? How are LLMs more efficient and 'infinitely' better at this than what Google had before AI overviews? If anything, I find that search results have gotten worse.
You have to actually engineer that though, you can't just throw random stuff into ChatGPT and expect good results.
It’s still not as good as actually searching the web semantically as I used to often find myself wanting to get rid of results that sounded vaguely like my search term but actually completely missed the point, but it makes it somewhat bearable again.
What pisses me off is that you can't turn it off. Like, fine, you may bury and dark pattern the crap out of the disable toggle, but at least give users the choice to opt-out. And no, UDM=14 is not a toggle.
If they would have stuck to the original white paper and remembered the section on ads, Google Search would still be worth using.
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.
Cloud is on pace to be bigger than Search/Ads next year...
Do you really think Search/Ads is going to lose 100% of its revenue by next year to flip that difference?
I used perplexity for some time. These days, I have claude and chatgpt. They search on my behalf. Sometimes I still do a Google search but I mostly just use it if I want to open a website that I don't remember the url of.
And it’s not like they can stop the long-term move towards AI from traditional search engines.
All they can do is try to compete with their own AI. Otherwise OpenAI and Anthropic will run away with it.
But the search revenue is growing at a high speed.
The article wording is just unfortunate.
The non-misleading title would be: "Google Cloud growing way faster than other sources of Alphabet revenue".
Not exactly - the consumer stuff (subscriptions and devices) falls under services, while cloud covers GCP, Workspace, and enterprise-specific cloud services (like maps etc).
Basically if you pay for it with a monthly sub on a personal google account (including Gemini stuff like Ai pro) it's services.
And the AI response in the Google Search still has factual errors occasionally...
On the contrary, the ChatGPT has been doing great. The accuracy, recall, precision, or whatever metrics of ChatGPT exceeds Google Search by a large margin. Or close to or exceed what a human expert can do
This time I have had no problem switching. I'm using Duck for 99% of anything I search for and it's just fine.
The 1% of the time, if I'm really stuck on something I try google shopping or images and its usually no better.
I realized quickly that google search was giving me a very distorted view in its search results, it is making a lot of specific editorial decisions that I wasn't quite aware of, or had lots awareness of over time.
Duck.ai is pretty good too. It's been nice to be able to finally switch, and it'll be interesting to see what happens with duckduckgo now that they can truly see some sustained growth (I can't be alone in this experience).
I'm not really sure why you say that cloud compute isn't a moat. It's an enormous investment to compete there; there's a reason even large companies buy compute from GCP/Azure/AWS or even if they have their own compute don't attempt to compete. Additionally, GCP has been an enormously successful 'bet' for Google over the past decade.
Google has also turned subscription revenue for their various services into a major revenue stream; it'd be hard to call those various services (Google Drive, Google Play, etc.) anything other than successful.
Chrome doesn't generate revenue by itself, but it certainly drives advertising revenue across the rest of Google's portfolio and was developed in-house.
Finally, it's pretty strange to credit the success of YouTube as a revenue stream with a small loss-making company that was acquired in 2006 rather than Google, who has run it for the past 20 years.
Enterprises actively do not want Cloud provider's services distinguished by anything other than speed, cost, and reliability, because features imply lock-in. They'd rather have someone else's computer as bare-metal and run features atop that.
That's a recipe for racing to the bottom in the cloud space against the other providers, where the wins are very raw: what hardware did you predict two years ago you needed today, what breakthroughs in information structuring have your competitors not yet implemented in their own clouds, etc.
It's raw capitalistic competition, and that's good for consumers... But companies don't want that because it's a path to net-neutral revenue in the long-term, which is not how you put your stock on the moon.
But if your business is not tech, it makes a hell of lot of sense to pay a few bucks extra for a managed service like Cloud SQL to host your databases and let Google handle the security patches and backups etc, instead of hiring your own DBA to do it for you.
I disagree on this. It's not clear how much money they are actually making and how much revenues are shifted over from other business lines to GCP because GCP earnings growth is / was valued higher than other business lines by the markets.
GCP has a reputation on being the fastest compute and network available. Also the most bang-for-your-buck (on hyperscalers) ML infrastructure by far (because TPUs)
Amazon is "the default" (and most expensive). Works with everything.
Azure is "Microsoft cloud". It's not fast, cheaper but certainly not cheap, ...
But of course that should be interpreted as GCP being 10x the cost of on-prem hardware (for equivalent storage/performance). Azure 13x or so. And Amazon a solid 20x (mostly because none of their products deliver the performance advertised and because if you buy 1 thing of Amazon, they bill you for 20 different things). Even with the price hikes a server under your desk (not the same, I know, however, once you have 20 servers in 2 rooms in 2 buildings and kubernetes running the workloads it is the same in reliability)
I hate Azure, but Microsoft is at least trying to sell it properly. You get a human you can talk to and their support is responsive (although it's also useless).
> Finally, it's pretty strange to credit the success of YouTube as a revenue stream with a small loss-making company that was acquired in 2006 rather than Google, who has run it for the past 20 years.
As a Youtube user, I don't really see any improvements in it (aside from technical ones) compared to 10 years ago.
The result is that it's basically impossible to get off the ground to compete with yt, because early adopters are almost universally tech forward. And tech forward people don't pay for shit (except the 1-5% who do).
> not including acquisitions
Of which only Chrome is in-house created. I wouldn't think Chrome brings in a lot of revenue, and these days I'd argue FF is a much better product.
I want FF to be successful, but unfortunately it's not really up to Mozilla
Google didn't create Android or Maps. Android was made in 2003 by other people. Maps was Keyhole and something made in Australia.
I don't know enough about Chrome to say.
Android had a market share of 0, with no released products when they bought it. The 80%+ market share today was all Google.
Google Maps was purchased (pre Google IPO), but the original (“Where2”) was a desktop application. Google completed rebuilt it alongside the acquisition of other data sources, and released the web page. Years later, they built a mobile app which became one of the biggest apps of all time. Should we not attribute that success to Google instead of the Australian startup building a desktop app?
It's safe to say Google brought Android to the level it is now.
Android was made in 2003 by other people.
That's very different from Android, which was an unreleased prototype that had zero users and was dramatically different even from what ended up shipping as the first product, let alone what it is today. Android at acquisition would be unrecognizable from what the majority of people worldwide are typing on this very minute.
I never made that claim.
That's nothing?
> That's nothing?
Either you replied to the wrong comment or you didn't read the comment you're replying to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29...
To clarify in good faith: what percentage of Android development do you think went on before 2005 in, let's say, mythical man months. 5%? 1%? Less?
As a simple example, a week ago we had the GCP outage in UK, their status page said all was good.
This is what allow little SMEs to not have to suffer that piece of shit that Windows is. I know people running their SMEs (and I helped them set up Google Workspace) from Mac and Chromebooks since years and years and who do not ever want to here again from anything Microsoft.
They're basically doing everything inside "Google Workspace" (formerly "G Suite", formerly "Google apps for domain" because Google's product naming is just confusing).
Gemini is also IMO excellent for everything that is not coding. It's really rare that I use Anthropic models (which I pay a subscription for) for anything else than coding.
GMail / Drive / Google Docs / Google Spreadsheets are great for a shitload of SMEs out there who want to give Windows and Office the middle finger.
I could make this make sense either way
I use Gemini Pro for every day stuff and Opus is much better than it. A lot more features and everything works better, especially in the websites. Gemini is just... dumber overall. I had a project/gem (now replaced by a skill) and sometimes I'd start with them and then veer of course along the way. Gemini would religiously follow the initial context, stupidly, while Opus realized that a good chunk if it wasn't needed anymore after my last prompt and did the right thing.
It’s likely made no impact on iphone sales, but I don’t think it’s a reasonable goal. Android and iPhone users don’t meaningfully switch, the goal would be to gain Android customers, and it seems, drive market direction. 5% of all US phones, which is 10% of android phones, doesn’t seem terrible considering they’re certainly spending a lot less than Samsung et al in R&D
As it would have done naturally anyway
When Google bought YouTube, it already had Google Video. Google saw that YouTube had market traction and pivoted quickly, to its (and YouTube's) credit.
TV had both 15-20 minute of ad breaks every hour AND product placement during actual content.
That's where we're going in about 10-15 years.
YouTube has had sponsors and inline ads for years from the content creators, so I’m fairly confident we’re already approaching the saturation point in some form.
On top of these ads, creators are inserting their own ads ("this video is sponsored by ...."), so it's ads all the way down (like turtles).
At least 30% of Americans use an ad blocker.
Everything they make from within flops 99% of the time.
Before they acquired these, how were they doing? I'll give you a hint: they weren't exactly how we knew them today. Android was literally a concept and YouTube was bleeding money with no realistic path to profitability.
> Everything they make from within flops 99% of the time.
As do all inventions? Of course, you just don't hear about all the failings from individuals or smaller companies that went bust as a result. The important thing is the 1% that succeed are so successful it offsets the losses.
They used to have a second minimint in AdSense et. al. ("Display Advertising"), but that shrinks by the year economy-wide as the vicious cycle of data tracking, ad blocking, and paywall dodging continues. Now it's a mere $7B[1], compared to $11B for Youtube (technically also Display Advertising but it gets its own segment now, I guess) and $63B from the money printer proper.
[1] Actual report here: https://s206.q4cdn.com/479360582/files/doc_financials/2026/q... Interestingly, display revenues are slightly up! But still, in Google land, "slightly up" is potentially a scandalous failure. Perhaps they settled into better agreements with big publishers ("sell side") after it became clear that they wouldn't actually be punished for having a Display Ads monopoly, despite losing the antitrust case brought by Biden's DoJ.
:(
https://www.democracynow.org/2026/10/29/sofia_liguori_google...
I do use search engines, and chatbots, but when I need to find a tool, a project, a channel, it is just easier.
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
https://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-top - also a simplified, trimmed version of it
I don't rely on search engines that much any more.
And Google knows it, so why not squeeze the current customers, whatever model AI takes it’s unlikely to be a word matching auction, this model is dead, grab the cash and go.
Source?
Google Search & other revenue grew 12% YoY in Q3 [1]. In that time paid clicks grew 8% and cost per click 4%.
Across the Google Network impressions fell 14%, with cost-per-impressions growing 14%. (9% of revenue.) But that’s on the web, not search.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/0001...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/google-admits-ai-sea...
I’ve been saying for a while that AI is going to be a bigger problem for Google than many realize: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47957708
Personally I have doubts that AI search would ever be as lucrative as traditional search, which I expanded on in that comment I linked.
I use Kagi and am skeptical of the debt-fuelled AI build-out. But 12% growth amidst a strategic pivot is unabashed good news. The stock sank because of the capital expenditure, not this.
[1] https://247wallst.com/investing/2026/10/29/google-admits-its...
The only revenue covered by Network is what it pays out to newspapers and other kinds of ad-supported websites.
Search revenue still grew: the share fell because the rest of Alphabet grew faster.
There have always been alternative search engines. People still use Google plenty and its AI Overview has gotten a lot better. Probably plenty good for most people.
It doesn't /inherently/ return better search results, but Google is many years into an intensive project to make their search results so bad that even a magic eight ball, let alone a moderately advanced AI, can do better.
"News oil prices trump iran" became "Why is gas 20 cents more today? Did something happen with Trump and Iran talks?"
This change even predates LLMs. Regular people were constantly sending queries like that 10+ years ago.
Google's organic search results are ranked by quality (including how many people click on them).
AI, generally thinks the best result is what's most common, or average, resulting in decent results, but not the best for what you're looking for.
We notice it when we're looking for a level of specificity google can hit, compared to an ai model. It's why Google's AI search can hit a bit differen too.
The example that comes to top of mind is a search that is not made for search rarely can compare to something as well as Perplexity.
What does this even mean? They're ranked by metrics that are assumed to be a proxy for quality, but (a) the accuracy of those proxies varies widely and (b) the ranks are relative; if a result is no longer in the response pool the fact that it would have been higher quality is invisible. Consider the year where anyone who's profile had been tagged as a software developer couldn't find any information on tost rings for sailplane towing because the "autocorrection" to toString was so strong that no mechanism besides logging out gave any relevant results; there's always crap like this going on.
Google ranked the best results, not the most commonly occurring ones.
AI is by default returning the highest statistical percentage of what it thinks you are looking for in a response, which may or may not be a search result.
A fun example is having the AI run a search, and comparing it to perplexity, or even gemini a little. OpenAI is improving, and Claude is pretty consistently not made for comprehensive search.
Often when we use a search engine, we're trying to piece together something that might be across multiple links, or a single link
Google didn't exactly leave us much choice to opt out. I have to use a firefox extension to hide that bit.
I was just looking in the Workspace account of a relatively small local business, and realized they're spending ~$6k/yr on Workspace. Multiply that by however other small businesse are on Workspace, add in larger enterprise customers, and you're probably at a decent chunk of revenue.
They have an all you can eat buffet of cash from those two sitting right in front of them, but they can't build DC's fast enough to capture it. If that buffet dries up, the damage would probably be much worse then Gemini becoming non-competitive.
Literally all my non tech friends are writing Gemini gems or using notebooklm, with a minority on copilot.
OpenAI and Anthropic can catch up, but first they must invent Google search, Google Maps, Gmail, Google Calendar, Youtube and Android.
The thing they're doing correctly right now imho, is that AI mode is mostly toggled for things that passes a quick questions filter (probably low probability of a purchase, like "global illumination methods" giving a decent overview of the field) while if you just type green shoes it'll put out an assortment of online and local shopping options.
Now if as someone said in the sibling comments, Google is gouging their customers with the new auction model that's another problem, but if I was a shareholder I'd be less worried about an exodus of end users to OpenAI,etc than I was a year ago.
it grew compared to q3 2025, but it is flat (0% grows) compared to q2 2026.
YouTube did ~$60B in revenue last year.
Search was $63.4B "Everything else" was $64.2B, out of which GCP was $30.7B
Is AI on the 33.5B remaining post GCP? or within the 30.7 of GCP?
You cant: 1) win the personal agent (requires a vm for every user) 2) win cloud sales (requires selling your compute) 3) win model war (requires using your compute) 4) win the chip war (requires selling your tpu's themselvs)
Weirdly enough their issue is they're to small to fight every battle, MSFT+Nvidia+Meta+Oai+oracle is like 14T in market cap.
Search no longer works and you are killing your most important product with AI that nobody wants. If search worked like in 2010, no one would use AI answers.
I remember 10 years ago that Google was extremely paranoid about having the whole company propped up on one revenue tent-pole.
Do they control the default Search engine for Android? For Chrome?
Did they pay to be the default Search engine on iPhone? On Firefox?
Are those rare resources? I'd say yes.
And you're conflating "illegally-maintained Monopoly" with "Monopoly." Whether they got there through using illegal tactics or not is a separate question from whether they are a Monopoly now. 90% - is that a high enough market share to qualify as a monopoly, when their annual revenue is like $224 billion? What percentage would be enough to convince you? Does it need to be 100%?
For example, non-regulatory attempts at blocking of competitors, which Google does engage in due to their dominant position in mobile (of course, that's also just another better product)
You can have shady corporate behavior and regulatory practices enabling each other.
What is even stranger, though, is ... the alternatives suck even more.
I don't know where to even start. Take qwant. Well, first check they do is "are you a bot". That's wasting my time. I am not a bot. But, while this may be a minor annoyance, qwant also yields crap results. It does, however had, which is quite interesting, also yield results that Google search does not yield. I had some good results here with regards to images. But in general, searching the www for useful information, really took a dive in the last 5-10 years. And a HUGE dive. Many people noticed this. There are tons of webpages pointing this out. And videos on youtube too (owned by Google, the monster that ruined its search engine).
I am surprised google search still yields any money to Google, considering how crap it has become. In the past I could even read webforum entries in behind the "you must be logged in". I did this, for instance, on a text-based MUD I retired from many years before that, but I was still curious what kind of changes they made. Then google removed that feature - and many more - deliberately. That was when Google decided to cripple its search engine. Then came AI slop and slop-degraded the remaining rest. The nuclear slop holocaust eradicating useful information. Thankfully Wikipedia still exists, and while it has several issues, quality-wise it is a blessing compared to what we typically see nowadays.
So if you need tl;dw or something to do with YouTube video, gemini is the most seamless
Also, of course, before anyone even realized the game was on at Google, Anthropic and OpenAI already downloaded the entirety of YouTube.