Have we stopped evaluating companies based on vision and expectations? Because mapping all of reality is a pretty solid strategy that Google is striving for.
So far, it's an ad agency with hobbies. The inspirational quotes they feed their employees and shareholders shouldn't distract you from their actual business.
Unnecessarily alarmist. It's true that Google isnt making free ad money anymore and other companies are viable threats unlike Yahoo and Microsoft of 2004. Google has lots of monetizable balls in the air - Cloud, Pixel line and few others.
But still ads are ~95% of their revenues. Google has a lot of balls in the air and only one of them is profitable. Microsoft and Samsung have made more money from Android than Google has. The alarmism is definitely overblown, but don't paint Google as a company with diverse revenue streams, because it's not.
Alexa and Google Home are mostly gimmicks at this point, they are by no means a threat to Google's core revenue stream. though, ad blockers are. But Google's biggest enemy is itself, because I think if Google goes the path they seem to be going in response to ad blockers, with Chrome's ad blocking, (blocking competitor ads, but not their own) the FTC could very well step in and destroy their momentum.
~88%, but there's still $3 billion quarterly in other revenue in Google.
> Google has a lot of balls in the air and only one of them is profitable.
That's not clear, because while Alphabet breaks out operating income and loss between Google and Other Bets, they don't break out that within Google, only breaking out Revenue. At least in summary docs. Other Bets aren't profitable, but it's not at all clear that the non-advertising parts of Google aren't.
Exactly, they are still at almost $20B in quarterly ad revenue. Facebook is their only competitor because of its captive and mobile audience. Plus they are already diversifying with more bets on the cloud plus things like Waymo, etc.
Edit: misquoted data thinking it was yearly not quarterly.
I remember 10-15 years ago there was a site that had all the latest commercials, just to show what creative stuff was going on in the advertising world.
Imagine they auto-play and take 10x the bandwidth that the page you're visiting does. Sucks on bobile.
(I avoid trailers these days since in the past they have ruined movies for me either by setting expectations too high or simply showing too much of the movie.)
I guess it's hard to predict the future. This was published 4 days ago, before earnings released showed that the author has no idea what they are talking about.
There isn't enough evidence to back up his claims, especially about artificial intelligence. His claim that Amazon with Alexa will succeed in the marketplace is not definite at all. It's true Alexa has a head start, but Google is catching up to it. The situation kind of reminds me of android in 2010 vs. the iPhone. Look what happened there.
Honestly in my mind Google is already passing Amazon and their Alexa.
They just released an update to their Google Home which does individual voice recognition per person to offer individualized results for each, even going as far as to play my favorite playlists when asked, and my wife's when she asks.
My own experience is quite the opposite, though. As a user, I dislike ads and run uBlock Origin everywhere.
But as a seller (Amazon FBA), I have found Google Ads to be incredibly effective. Much more so than Sponsored Products on Amazon, which goes on to suggest that not all product searches start on Amazon.
Also, using Amazon tools for sellers is not a very pleasant experience. Everything is either broken or extremely complex, or inconsistent, or all three at a time. And let's not mention MWS (just look at the API documentation, it doesn't seem to have been updated since 1999).
AWS is still fantastic, but clearly Seller Central wasn't built - and isn't maintained - by the same team!
I think it's very possible that Amazon could collapse on its own weight -- if for example amazon.com became unavailable for a few days, and then had a hard time coming back up, etc.
Amazon is a machine of infinite complexity, and the way they deal with it is to add more people, which makes it super bureaucratic (very far from the lean mean machine they project to the outside world).
People have been predicting the collapse of Google for years. Someday they'll be right and it will be looked upon as great foresight. Is this that time? Who knows. Really could replace Google with "x" and still be correct.
not sure about rest of Europe, but when I search for product I go to local price comparison website, which is much more popular than Amazon, since by my experience pretty much everything on Amazon is more expensive than in plenty of local shops, other option would be I guess Aliexpress if it's not rushing and doesn't have to be some specific brand
article seem to be as usual very US-centric, Google is huge in Europe, Amazon not so much. in China Google doesn't exist and Amazon has also only leftovers
can't say I would miss either of them, since pretty much only useful products from Google for me are search (easily replacable) and Photos (not that easy, but there are alternatives)
I avoid amazon search like the plague. All that ever pops up when I search for a product is cheap chinese knockoffs with round numbers of mysterious, broken english, 5 star reviews and one pixelated photo. Google, specialist sites or local places are where I'll always go for product search.
I'm not sure what country you're in, but in the U.S. I've virtually never had that experience on Amazon. Sure, there are some lower quality products mixed in with the good stuff, but I always find it pretty easy to tell which is which. And, that being the case, I find that added degree of price/quality diversity to be a benefit in itself.
Edit: By the way, are we still talking about "cheap Chinese knockoffs"? Seems odd to include "Chinese" in that phrase when much of the high quality stuff is made there as well!
Well, I see some products listed that I would not want to buy. But I also see the Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream, and some USB battery packs that seem perfectly good. (In fact, I bought one of these results just the other week, and am very happy with it.) And generally, speaking, the star ratings are about what I would expect of most of these products, given my (modest) knowledge of these brands. Certainly the star ratings, generally speaking, appear to convey useful quality information.
But what I certainly don't see is any support for the claim that "All that ever pops up when I search for a product is cheap chinese knockoffs with round numbers of mysterious, broken english, 5 star reviews and one pixelated photo."
YMMV. I've been noticing that it's harder to find the actual thing I'm looking for when cheap knock offs are prevalent. My most recent search was for a specific brand of rat trap, but page after page of Amazon search showed products where I was unable to authenticate the product, and reviews suggested that knock offs were being sent to at least some customers. I ended up finding it easier to drive to the local Home Depot than digging through reviews trying to find the right seller to buy from.
Also a common Amazon profit maximizing trick (aka scam) is to sell a legitimate product, build up 5 star reviews then switch to a cheaper knock off and let the momentum take you as long as it can. Rinse and Repeat. Before I buy anything of consequence I sort reviews by date, and look for this pattern to save me headaches.
Search is a complete free market, and there are other competitors in the space. User switching costs are nearly zero, since choosing a different search engine is as easy as typing a URL. Yet, Google persists in adding the most value to user searches and dominates the space.
I'm not sure how easily Google Search will be dethroned.
I think the parent is wrong in "easily replaceable" but I think it will be replaced soon. For $5 I would pay for a private customizable search engine, someone will build it
I find it hilarious that people think something like Alexa / Google Home is anything but a gimmicky ad, let alone the future of computing. Like other ad supported content--Gmail for example--it has some useful features. Also like other ad supported mechanisms of the past, it's a huge invasion of a user's privacy for little gain. When this thing is actually "smart" (whatever that means) enough to do something useful without phoning back to Amazon and when that thing isn't just buying useless shit from Amazon, let's revisit. Until then, let's remember that this is just another medium for advertising. Nothing more. Nothing less. Google does, however, specialize and excel at one thing: advertising. I wouldn't count them out just yet.
hmm, it sort of make sense, not so young anymore, but not that old with helpful young children (usually) plus also as other user mentioned in combination with work computers it makes sense, but I would still think that 65+ group will get less tech support or they just don't care that much about ads, but who knows...
> Search was Google’s only unambiguous win, as well as its primary source of revenue, so when Amazon rapidly surpassed Google as the top product search destination, Google’s foundations began to falter.
This is the most annoying line though. Literally his own sources don't corroborate his assertion.
Also, it is in past tense. When the first source he links to is from 4Q 2016. Alphabet literally beat its earnings expectations yesterday.[0]
The post is written as if it was written in the future talking about things happening currently. See the line just below the title. Reporting from the very near post Google future.
Honestly I just wrote this for fun to play devil's advocate and see how convincing an argument I could make. It was intended to be more creative writing than a serious market prediction. (The title used to be "How Google Collapsed" -- Startup Grind changed it and added the subtitle when they published it on their blog).
I don't think it's likely that Google is going to collapse any time soon. I just wanted to imagine a world where they had, and try to work backwards from there with current data.
It's my first article, and I'm only 21 so I definitely got a lot of things wrong and oversimplified/combined others. But I do have almost 2 years of work experience in online advertising, so I have /some/ idea of how things work.
I was honestly expecting 12 views and a mean comment about how stupid I was -- I didn't expect the article to pick up traction. The editor in chief of Startup Grind reached out to me and asked if I would like to have it published on their blog, and I said sure.
In response to a few of your points:
> * Random claim that google lost a major portion of its audience already?
All the comments about losing an audience and revenue drying up are all in hypothetical retrospective :)
> * Google already missed its chance to pivot" with literally no explanation or justification at all.
This point was about how if Google didn't have search, it would need to pivot. I was using AI as the example pivot, based on Sundar Pichai's comments about how he sees the future of computing.
> * Alexa has clear monetization strategy, but google home doesn't?
There was a link in the article showing that investors were worried about Google Home's monetization strategy, and Sundar Pichai basically said "Don't worry about it." They also briefly tried to play audio ads with the Google Home, showing that they were at the very least unsure about how they were going to monetize it.
> Come on guy, you can do better than this.
Thanks. You're right. I appreciate the criticisms :)
I'm on mobile but I'll have a full reply later. Nothing against you personally at all, this is actually the exact type of post I enjoy writing myself actually.
Also - I did miss that this was a hypothetical retreospective, so some of my comment is incorrect.
Related: Here is an interesting piece from Benedict Evans, where he argues that there are currently many reasons voice technology isn't ready to be the next platform.
"There's a set of contradictions here, I think. Voice UIs look, conceptually, like much more unrestricted and general purpose interfaces than a smartphone, but they're actually narrower and more single-purpose. They look like less friction than pulling out your phone, unlocking it, loading an app and so on, and they are - but only if you've shifted your mental model. They look like the future beyond smartphones, but in their (necessarily) closed, locked-down nature they also look a lot like feature phones or carrier decks. And they're a platform, but one that might get worse the bigger the developer ecosystem"
I don't think the collapse of advertising is necessarily a collapse of Google. Google (Alphabet, really) has so much IP and many other possible ways to grow that if crap hits the fan they can change course. Not to mention they do seem to be generating plenty of revenue to keep people interested in buying their stock. So long as Wall Street is willing to bear the weight of their ventures then I don't see Google going away any time soon. More likely is that Google eventually leaves the advertising business as it becomes less relevant to their bottom line just like how Amazon isn't about books as much anymore (they still sell them, but they got so many other revenue streams that if books as a market cratered they wouldn't go bankrupt from it). When that "eventually" will happen I can't say but I'll say I'd be surprised advertising would be relevant to them in twenty years beyond a marginal line of business.
Mobile search is likely to be replaced by agents, and google controls one of the best AI agents and the world's most popular operating system.
Users hate ads but they don't necessarily hate paid responses to search queries, if they are appropriate. That business is not going away soon.
Also, just because YouTube isn't yet profitable doesn't mean it could be made profitable. The Author talks about how Amazon has surpassed google for product searches. Amazon was not profitable for a long time to prioritize growth. I think you can see the same thing with YouTube.
As an intern at Google back 7 years ago, a fairly senior developer that I liked working with told me something that really stuck with me: "Google found a hose that money pours out of, and it's called Online Advertising. All that we do now is try to make that hose work better, and try to find another hose."
I think the premise of this article is that Google's money hose is drying up and it seems they may not have found another hose.
I enjoyed the way the author laid it out, it illustrates the problem Google has, and I tend to watch Google's responses fairly closely. But in full disclosure mode, if this is the first you've heard me say this, and it isn't :-), I also believe that Google's inability to create a business outside of search advertising has put them in this spot.
I would also like to address a common response to the 'Google is doooomed' thesis, which is "Hey, look their revenues are going up and up, you would be stupid to think they were doomed!"
I've asserted for several years here that Google's core advertising business is rotting from the core outward. And I used as the basis for that tracking their reported "cost per click" erosion and their "paid traffic" growth.
The reasoning is pretty simple; At the most basic level Google puts an ad out there, and when that ad is 'clicked' [1] they collect a fee. And if you are familiar with the history, this was revolutionary where advertisers could pay only when someone demonstrably both saw their advertisement and indicated an interest in it with a click. And initially it was wonderful and then bad guys figured out they could insert themselves in the middle, selling advertising space to customers at a price per click and then buying the ads on google can clicking on them with their own computers and collect some ad revenue off the top. Easy riches except that the ads massively underperformed because most of the clicks on them were fraudulent. And that begat a war that continues to this day and has lead to a general disillusionment with online advertising.
So people get disillusioned, but as advertisers are setting the prices and budgets they show this by being unwilling to pay more for ads that they aren't sure will be effective. And since Google's system is auction based their pulling back results in the average price Google can get for a 'click' to go down. At which point Google has three choices, eat a revenue loss (not really a choice), give them more opportunities to buy ads, or increase the number of people who are getting a chance to click.
Google started by bringing more people in contact with their ads by "buying" traffic. The way that works is you find a web property where people are accessing the Internet and you pay the proprietor money to only show your ads to their traffic, or to move their traffic to your web site. So in the case of Firefox they paid mozilla to send their search traffic to Google, in the case of Apple they paid to have all of iOS search traffic go to Google by default. In all these cases you "lose" a bit by increasing your traffic acquisition costs (that money comes out of ad profits) but if you get more clicks from that traffic than you paid for it, you can cause your revenue number to increase. As the effectiveness of buying traffic has declined (and there just aren't that many sources out there and Microsoft is also paying for traffic so you end up paying more and more for less and less valuable traffic) and the cost has gone up, they moved on to stage two.
Stage two was to start increasing the number of ads you had exposure to when you landed on Google sites. You look at how hard people work to be in the first few search results on the page, well advertisers want to be in the first few ads. You can also create other ways to pay to play like, for example, charging advertisers a monthly fee in order to enable them to appear in a 'shopping box' result that appears on what looks like a shopping search query assuming they bid enough on their ad to show up there. Search engine result pages (SERPs) for shopping 'like' queries progressively got fewer and fewer organic results and turned into mostly ads. Google stopped surfacing organic web pages or web sites from their index that their algorithm told them were the best results for a query in favor of people who had paid to be on the page in the event a ...
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadGoogle has a lot of ads customers. Why do those customers use Google?
Hobbies that account for billions of dollars of quarterly revenue.
Alexa and Google Home are mostly gimmicks at this point, they are by no means a threat to Google's core revenue stream. though, ad blockers are. But Google's biggest enemy is itself, because I think if Google goes the path they seem to be going in response to ad blockers, with Chrome's ad blocking, (blocking competitor ads, but not their own) the FTC could very well step in and destroy their momentum.
~88%, but there's still $3 billion quarterly in other revenue in Google.
> Google has a lot of balls in the air and only one of them is profitable.
That's not clear, because while Alphabet breaks out operating income and loss between Google and Other Bets, they don't break out that within Google, only breaking out Revenue. At least in summary docs. Other Bets aren't profitable, but it's not at all clear that the non-advertising parts of Google aren't.
Edit: misquoted data thinking it was yearly not quarterly.
(EDIT: typo)
I think that's the only time that's ever happened for me, tho.
companies run specials and i buy stuff if i need it. it's pretty simple, i don't see why people on HN are so insanely negative about it.
(There do seem to be too many movie trailers these days before the movie starts, but I think we'd miss them if they were gone entirely.)
It got shut down for copyright.
(I avoid trailers these days since in the past they have ruined movies for me either by setting expectations too high or simply showing too much of the movie.)
https://venturebeat.com/2016/07/28/google-parent-alphabet-re...
https://abc.xyz/investor/news/earnings/2017/Q1_alphabet_earn...
Revenue is up 24% year over year. Beat analyst expectations, so the stock jumped ~4% yesterday.
They just released an update to their Google Home which does individual voice recognition per person to offer individualized results for each, even going as far as to play my favorite playlists when asked, and my wife's when she asks.
My own experience is quite the opposite, though. As a user, I dislike ads and run uBlock Origin everywhere.
But as a seller (Amazon FBA), I have found Google Ads to be incredibly effective. Much more so than Sponsored Products on Amazon, which goes on to suggest that not all product searches start on Amazon.
Also, using Amazon tools for sellers is not a very pleasant experience. Everything is either broken or extremely complex, or inconsistent, or all three at a time. And let's not mention MWS (just look at the API documentation, it doesn't seem to have been updated since 1999).
AWS is still fantastic, but clearly Seller Central wasn't built - and isn't maintained - by the same team!
I think it's very possible that Amazon could collapse on its own weight -- if for example amazon.com became unavailable for a few days, and then had a hard time coming back up, etc.
Amazon is a machine of infinite complexity, and the way they deal with it is to add more people, which makes it super bureaucratic (very far from the lean mean machine they project to the outside world).
We'll see.
And yet, the growth of Google's core business isn't declining and it hasn't even leveled off -- growth is actually accelerating!
Year-over-year revenues are growing faster now than they did last year.
Same thing with earnings.
And margins are expanding instead of shrinking.
Source: https://abc.xyz/investor/news/earnings/2017/Q1_alphabet_earn...
Not exactly what you'd expect to see from a business model in decline.
article seem to be as usual very US-centric, Google is huge in Europe, Amazon not so much. in China Google doesn't exist and Amazon has also only leftovers
can't say I would miss either of them, since pretty much only useful products from Google for me are search (easily replacable) and Photos (not that easy, but there are alternatives)
Edit: By the way, are we still talking about "cheap Chinese knockoffs"? Seems odd to include "Chinese" in that phrase when much of the high quality stuff is made there as well!
But what I certainly don't see is any support for the claim that "All that ever pops up when I search for a product is cheap chinese knockoffs with round numbers of mysterious, broken english, 5 star reviews and one pixelated photo."
Also a common Amazon profit maximizing trick (aka scam) is to sell a legitimate product, build up 5 star reviews then switch to a cheaper knock off and let the momentum take you as long as it can. Rinse and Repeat. Before I buy anything of consequence I sort reviews by date, and look for this pattern to save me headaches.
Search is a complete free market, and there are other competitors in the space. User switching costs are nearly zero, since choosing a different search engine is as easy as typing a URL. Yet, Google persists in adding the most value to user searches and dominates the space.
I'm not sure how easily Google Search will be dethroned.
RIM/Blackberry's best years in numbers happened AFTER the iPhone launched.
Life comes at you fast.
BlackBerry's highest profits were 2 years after the iPhone came out and the same year Android came out.
It has the slowest and most limited I/O in the world: voice, and people think it's the future?
Seriously?
Google Now on Tap (which they cut out, so it seems) was far more impressive innovation, and the way computers should work in the future.
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1000/1*o6B3OtXfG9pqwRDru...
Probably because the older group has progressively greater propensity to have other, younger people setting up their computers.
They don't, not according to that graph. Some national segments do, others don't. Looks like margin of error to me.
* OP is constantly misunderstanding the difference between search, shopping, display, native, and social.
* Unsubstantiated claim that youtube has 'insurmountable' problems
* Display ads having 0.06% is irrelevant - the goal isn't clicks
* Random claim that google lost a major portion of its audience already?
* "Google already missed its chance to pivot" with literally no explanation or justification at all.
* Alexa has clear monetization strategy, but google home doesn't?
This is a clickbait blog pretending to be a hit piece. Come on guy, you can do better than this.
This is the most annoying line though. Literally his own sources don't corroborate his assertion.
Also, it is in past tense. When the first source he links to is from 4Q 2016. Alphabet literally beat its earnings expectations yesterday.[0]
[0]:http://www.businessinsider.com/alphabet-google-reports-q1-ea...
It's written as a report from "the near future", so both current and speculated future events are written in the past tense.
It's a piece of not particularly insightful or entertaining speculative fiction.
Its like saying.. more people search for images in imgur than on google, so all of google search is going downhill.
Honestly I just wrote this for fun to play devil's advocate and see how convincing an argument I could make. It was intended to be more creative writing than a serious market prediction. (The title used to be "How Google Collapsed" -- Startup Grind changed it and added the subtitle when they published it on their blog).
I don't think it's likely that Google is going to collapse any time soon. I just wanted to imagine a world where they had, and try to work backwards from there with current data.
It's my first article, and I'm only 21 so I definitely got a lot of things wrong and oversimplified/combined others. But I do have almost 2 years of work experience in online advertising, so I have /some/ idea of how things work.
I was honestly expecting 12 views and a mean comment about how stupid I was -- I didn't expect the article to pick up traction. The editor in chief of Startup Grind reached out to me and asked if I would like to have it published on their blog, and I said sure.
In response to a few of your points:
All the comments about losing an audience and revenue drying up are all in hypothetical retrospective :) This point was about how if Google didn't have search, it would need to pivot. I was using AI as the example pivot, based on Sundar Pichai's comments about how he sees the future of computing. There was a link in the article showing that investors were worried about Google Home's monetization strategy, and Sundar Pichai basically said "Don't worry about it." They also briefly tried to play audio ads with the Google Home, showing that they were at the very least unsure about how they were going to monetize it. Thanks. You're right. I appreciate the criticisms :)Also - I did miss that this was a hypothetical retreospective, so some of my comment is incorrect.
I definitely should have made the intended perspective clearer than I did.
http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/2/22/voice-and-the-u...
An excerpt:
"There's a set of contradictions here, I think. Voice UIs look, conceptually, like much more unrestricted and general purpose interfaces than a smartphone, but they're actually narrower and more single-purpose. They look like less friction than pulling out your phone, unlocking it, loading an app and so on, and they are - but only if you've shifted your mental model. They look like the future beyond smartphones, but in their (necessarily) closed, locked-down nature they also look a lot like feature phones or carrier decks. And they're a platform, but one that might get worse the bigger the developer ecosystem"
Which is a lot, but it's still $3+ billion in non-advertising revenue quarterly.
Mobile search is likely to be replaced by agents, and google controls one of the best AI agents and the world's most popular operating system.
Users hate ads but they don't necessarily hate paid responses to search queries, if they are appropriate. That business is not going away soon.
Also, just because YouTube isn't yet profitable doesn't mean it could be made profitable. The Author talks about how Amazon has surpassed google for product searches. Amazon was not profitable for a long time to prioritize growth. I think you can see the same thing with YouTube.
And, oh yeah, they get a cut of a store that is projected to have $42B in revenue in 2021. (https://9to5mac.com/2017/03/29/app-store-android-app-market-...)
I think the premise of this article is that Google's money hose is drying up and it seems they may not have found another hose.
I would also like to address a common response to the 'Google is doooomed' thesis, which is "Hey, look their revenues are going up and up, you would be stupid to think they were doomed!"
I've asserted for several years here that Google's core advertising business is rotting from the core outward. And I used as the basis for that tracking their reported "cost per click" erosion and their "paid traffic" growth.
The reasoning is pretty simple; At the most basic level Google puts an ad out there, and when that ad is 'clicked' [1] they collect a fee. And if you are familiar with the history, this was revolutionary where advertisers could pay only when someone demonstrably both saw their advertisement and indicated an interest in it with a click. And initially it was wonderful and then bad guys figured out they could insert themselves in the middle, selling advertising space to customers at a price per click and then buying the ads on google can clicking on them with their own computers and collect some ad revenue off the top. Easy riches except that the ads massively underperformed because most of the clicks on them were fraudulent. And that begat a war that continues to this day and has lead to a general disillusionment with online advertising.
So people get disillusioned, but as advertisers are setting the prices and budgets they show this by being unwilling to pay more for ads that they aren't sure will be effective. And since Google's system is auction based their pulling back results in the average price Google can get for a 'click' to go down. At which point Google has three choices, eat a revenue loss (not really a choice), give them more opportunities to buy ads, or increase the number of people who are getting a chance to click.
Google started by bringing more people in contact with their ads by "buying" traffic. The way that works is you find a web property where people are accessing the Internet and you pay the proprietor money to only show your ads to their traffic, or to move their traffic to your web site. So in the case of Firefox they paid mozilla to send their search traffic to Google, in the case of Apple they paid to have all of iOS search traffic go to Google by default. In all these cases you "lose" a bit by increasing your traffic acquisition costs (that money comes out of ad profits) but if you get more clicks from that traffic than you paid for it, you can cause your revenue number to increase. As the effectiveness of buying traffic has declined (and there just aren't that many sources out there and Microsoft is also paying for traffic so you end up paying more and more for less and less valuable traffic) and the cost has gone up, they moved on to stage two.
Stage two was to start increasing the number of ads you had exposure to when you landed on Google sites. You look at how hard people work to be in the first few search results on the page, well advertisers want to be in the first few ads. You can also create other ways to pay to play like, for example, charging advertisers a monthly fee in order to enable them to appear in a 'shopping box' result that appears on what looks like a shopping search query assuming they bid enough on their ad to show up there. Search engine result pages (SERPs) for shopping 'like' queries progressively got fewer and fewer organic results and turned into mostly ads. Google stopped surfacing organic web pages or web sites from their index that their algorithm told them were the best results for a query in favor of people who had paid to be on the page in the event a ...