[HN Gopher] Google Earning Q1 2024 [pdf]
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Google Earning Q1 2024 [pdf]
Author : neel8986
Score : 86 points
Date : 2024-04-25 20:07 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (abc.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (abc.xyz)
| pb7 wrote:
| Stock is +13% after hours so far.
| samspenc wrote:
| Wow they announced their first-ever dividend (following Meta
| which announced theirs last quarter).
| lupire wrote:
| Leading from behind.
| guyzero wrote:
| yes, thank goodness Meta finally invented dividends.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Fascinating that they're issuing a dividend. Can't find anything
| better to do to drive growth?
| neel8986 wrote:
| It is $300B/year company growing at 15%. I don't think growth
| is an issue here
| endisneigh wrote:
| _Better_
| duringmath wrote:
| It's not like they can make any major acquisitions in this
| political environment.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Google has $100B+ of cash and is giving out $10B/yr as a
| dividend. I think they will be able to scrape something
| together if they have a good idea.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Yes - and what they've decided is a dividend. It's the first
| in their history. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but it's
| something.
| lupire wrote:
| The interesting part is why they chose to issue a dividend
| instead of sticking only with a theoretically equivalent
| buyback.
| tryptophan wrote:
| Yeah, they should spend it making 5 new chat apps.
| adonovan wrote:
| Or halting the layoffs.
| lupire wrote:
| This has nothing to do with layoffs. They have plenty of
| money for salary even after these payouts. The layoffs are
| intended to reduce costs / increase profit. Google has no
| desire for employees; they only have employees insofar they
| are a _necessary_ expense.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| They are growing as fast as they can in terms of data center
| and GPU output. They're supply constrained.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Where would you spend that cash?
|
| They already have >150k employees they can redeploy at will to
| enter any new market.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Funnily enough, Peter Thiel called this years ago.
| dlachausse wrote:
| Dividends were originally the main point of owning corporate
| stocks in the first place.
| formercoder wrote:
| I'm a Googler who doesn't do anything remotely close to setting
| capital return policy. Just remember Alphabet has been buying
| back 10s of billions for a while. Dividends are just a
| different capital return mechanism.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > Alphabet's Board of Directors today authorized the company to
| repurchase up to an additional $70.0 billion of its Class A and
| Class C shares in a manner deemed in the best interest of the
| company and its stockholders
|
| The most important item on the report
| office_drone wrote:
| At today's closing price this is 3.6% of outstanding shares
| belter wrote:
| Also...10,000 fired... Employees previous equivalent
| quarter:190,711 and now:180,895
|
| Edit: 190,711 employees on March 31, 2023
| acchow wrote:
| Closest comparison is the last quarter were they ended with
| 182,502
| belter wrote:
| Correct. Edited my comment to clarify number of 190,711 was
| as of March 2023.
| omoikane wrote:
| Layoff is not the same as "fired". Please use the correct
| terminology in consideration for those who lost their jobs.
|
| Also, the termination dates for those who were laid off in
| January 2023 would be around April 2023 (the layoff news came
| earlier due to WARN act), so the employee count as of
| 2023-03-31 might not include those people. This means a
| difference of ~10000 can be accounted for by the 2023-01-20
| round of layoffs.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Exact same level of authorization in April '22 and '23
| fdsakljalkj wrote:
| What an odd statement. Care to explain why you think a routine
| buyback announcement is important?
| dmckinno wrote:
| I thought that this earnings announcement would be the first one
| where we'd see some impact from competitive knowledge engines,
| e.g. Perplexity, You.com, ChatGPT + Bing, etc., but Google still
| grew search $6B/15%.
|
| This is impressive both because it's hard to keep such a big
| business growing at that rate and because essentially everyone in
| my social circle has moved on from going to Google first for
| information. I guess our demographic is not predictive of the
| larger market.
| foogazi wrote:
| > everyone in my social circle has moved on from going to
| Google first for information
|
| Or have they ?
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I'll admit that despite having a GPT4 sub which I use often,
| I still fallback on google for quick questions and
| verification of what GPT4 says if I need to be certain.
|
| Not even because I am particularly going to google, it's just
| so heavily integrated.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I find GPT4 requires long queries to get much out. And I
| can't be bothered typing out a long query if Google can
| give me the same in 3 words and scanning down the result
| page.
| asadm wrote:
| you will like perplexity pro then?
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Or Kagi, which is essentially LLM + citation links (with
| the '?' suffix)
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| I have moved to Kagi as my search engine, although 99.99..%
| of people will probably never pay for search. Anecdotally,
| whenever I'm not finding what I need on Kagi and fallback to
| Google (less than once per week), it's shocking what a
| disaster the UX of Google's products have become (Maps is an
| even bigger offender than Search, where seemingly arbitrarily
| labeled places get more visibility than the search results).
| EL_Loco wrote:
| What do you use instead of Google Maps? I don't know enough
| about alternatives to choose one.
| duringmath wrote:
| You still have to verify plausible sounding LLM output
| somewhere.
| utensil4778 wrote:
| And Google is doing a worse and worse job of performing that
| role or any other.
|
| There are other search engines and almost all of them are
| orders of magnitude better than google is now.
| duringmath wrote:
| Citations needed there buddy
| utensil4778 wrote:
| No, not really.
|
| The decline of Google's search performance is on the
| front page of HN at least once a week. It's common
| knowledge at this point.
|
| Try Kagi if you want to be reminded of what good search
| is like.
| NtochkaNzvanova wrote:
| On what metrics of search quality is Kagi "orders of
| magnitude" better than Google?
| Jensson wrote:
| It is probably massively better for niche technical
| searches which many technical people here do for their
| job, that is the Kagis userbase after all.
|
| But such searches doesn't generate much ad revenue, so it
| doesn't do much to Google to lose them, all the people
| searching for articles about makeup or clothes or games
| or other things that has strong advertisement potential
| Google is awesome as a search engine, I haven't seen
| anyone say Kagi is better there. Kagi is only better for
| the searches that Google doesn't care about since they
| generate so little ad revue, Google uses so much compute
| per search that I'm not even sure such technical searches
| would be profitable for them to run, likely that would
| increase profits to lose them to Kagi.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| That is something that you can only decide for yourself.
| tech_buddha wrote:
| The layoffs and dividend are related -- the company's death
| rattle has been shaking a while now. Management is desperate to
| retain the confidence of the investor class.
| alphabetting wrote:
| > death rattle
|
| Stock up 16% after hours.
| StressedDev wrote:
| I think most companies would love to being "dying" like
| Google "is". Seriously, Google is not dying and making
| obviously false claims is not helpful.
| NtochkaNzvanova wrote:
| Top 5 most valuable company on earth
|
| Massive YoY growth
|
| Massive cash horde, buybacks, dividends
|
| Target of endless legal actions due to market dominance
|
| "death rattle"
| abadpoli wrote:
| Seems like a situation where it's worth it to be cognizant of
| your bubble.
|
| I don't know exactly what you meant by "our demographic", but
| I'm a frequent reader of HN, work in tech, and generally stay
| up to date with all things tech, and yet... I don't know if a
| single person that doesn't still use Google as their go-to
| place for information. Before this comment I had never even
| heard of Perplexity or You.com. /shrug
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| I think this is the same thing I feel when I read Meta's
| earnings. I continue to see growth in usage of their core
| properties but I don't think my entire circle touches Facebook
| or even Instagram nearly as much.
|
| Whatsapp certainly isn't driving those ad dollars so it truly
| is remarkable how disconnected my demographic (loosely using my
| here) is from the overall world usage.
| carlossouza wrote:
| The world is much larger than the bubble we live in.
| spydum wrote:
| Or they are counting bots and other ai agents and ignoring
| the truth?
| sahila wrote:
| Ultimately advertisers want a return on their spend and
| it's a closely watched metric for marketers. Them
| continuing to spend is indicative that there's growing
| value in ads, ie bots/ai agents cannot be the reason for
| their growth.
|
| You could argue fb and particularly twitter are
| incentivized to include it in their DAU counts but market
| cares more for revenue for large companies.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| "There is no alternative"
|
| I wouldn't put it past Google/Meta coopting corporate
| advertisers. Everyone makes everyone look good, by
| stating the best possible numbers.
| ajross wrote:
| Google and Meta literally represent alternative
| advertising products.
| sharadov wrote:
| You have no idea of Whatsapp's marketshare in India - all
| small businesses use Whatsapp for all communication and even
| take payments. That's a 1.4B population.
| endisneigh wrote:
| This site has always been a bubble.
| okdood64 wrote:
| Agreed. Reddit is a bubble too if you take note of the
| viewpoints there, but that reaches a wider variety of folks.
| Imagine how much of a bubble HN is.
| Jensson wrote:
| HN is a bubble where people listen to what you say even if
| you argue against them, I haven't found any such place
| anywhere else before. I've found some people who listen
| even to people they disagree with on some niche forums, but
| never a community as big as this with density this high.
|
| Other than listening and arguing in relatively good faith I
| don't think HN is a bubble, although such people probably
| have pretty different opinions than the typical person
| simply because they listen and change themselves more so it
| gets more refined.
| baron816 wrote:
| I think that most of the traffic being stolen away is going to
| be for low value searches. I (and probably almost everyone
| else) use Google when I already know what I want, ie I'm trying
| to get to a company's website to buy a particular thing, but
| don't know their url name.
|
| I'm not going to use an LLM to shop for car insurance or look
| for hotels.
| falcor84 wrote:
| >I'm not going to use an LLM to shop for car insurance or
| look for hotels.
|
| As I understand it, this is a great use-case for AI agents
| (a-la Custom GPT) and I wouldn't be surprised if the tech for
| that matures over the next year.
| linkjuice4all wrote:
| I guess I could imagine how they might be helpful in
| initial research - but no way I'm letting some LLM book a
| hotel that might not exist or get me car insurance from
| StratesFrarm Unsurance.
| Jensson wrote:
| > but no way I'm letting some LLM book a hotel that might
| not exist or get me car insurance from StratesFrarm
| Unsurance.
|
| Ah, scammers targeting your LLM assistant will certainly
| be a thing, this really sounds like the old "I bought the
| Eiffel tower" scams.
| amf12 wrote:
| LLM responses have also started embedding ads [1], or LLM
| responses are themselves ads [2]
|
| - [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/17ky9sg/first
| _time... - [2]
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/reddit-sneaky-ai-
| spa...
| chatmasta wrote:
| Google Search is a product embedded in the lives of everyone on
| the planet. I wonder to what extent its growth is a reflection
| of increasing population and Internet penetration. Even if
| "competitive knowledge engines" impacted Google Search, the
| effect would likely be minuscule compared to existing growth
| trajectories.
|
| Speaking personally, there are some queries where I prefer an
| LLM. But usually I start with Google, and it's only after 5-10
| searches that I get frustrated enough to remember I could just
| ask ChatGPT instead. So ironically, I actually send _more_
| searches to Google than I would have if they gave me the answer
| on the first one.
|
| I wonder what their search metrics would look like if they
| removed quick bursts of searches. Presumably, someone searching
| five times in a row is actually having a _bad_ experience,
| rather than loving the product so much they came back to it
| five times in one minute.
| NtochkaNzvanova wrote:
| > _essentially everyone in my social circle has moved on from
| going to Google first for information. I guess our demographic
| is not predictive of the larger market._
|
| "Google is dead, no one goes there anymore" is one of the most
| tired takes I see frequently on HN. It's nice to hear someone
| express the self-awareness to realize that what they see in
| their immediate circle is not representative of reality.
| jeffbee wrote:
| If you have a social circle where 100% of your contacts turn to
| an LLM first, not only have you buried yourself deep in a niche
| filter bubble, but you have also surrounded yourself with some
| of the planet's most misinformed people. If I were you, I'd be
| worried.
| harmmonica wrote:
| When you say moved on can you share what you're using when you
| want/need to buy something online? Understand you moving on for
| information, but just curious what you're using these days for
| a specific product.
| eitland wrote:
| I went to Kagi.
|
| Only better quality alternative I found that has the same
| coverage and is available here.
|
| FWIW for my purposes Marginalia is also a lot better quality
| (less annoying, more likely to give me the results I want -
| if it has them) than Google now but I cannot use it as my
| only search engine since the index is still small.
|
| The other big ones (Bing, DDG) managed to still be worse than
| Google last time I tried despite Google goong out of their
| way to make it easy for others to walk past them.
|
| There was another interesting one but they discriminated
| against non Americans and didn't even allow is to try so I
| don't know. It looked promising though, but as long as kagi
| don't betray us I get I stay with it.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _when you want /need to buy something online_
|
| Not OP, but Kagi/reddit/trustedReviewSites/anywhereButAmazon.
| cloudking wrote:
| I think I am opted into an experiment, but when I use Google
| search the first results are answers from their own LLM.
|
| https://search.google/
| sharadov wrote:
| I was asking GPT some question reg a Postgres feature , it gave
| me the answer with the caveat that it's knowledgebase hadn't
| been updated in a year.
|
| I went right back to google.
| csxv68 wrote:
| Or there is large scale number fudging and fraud.
|
| Just remember no one is auditing what views, likes and clicks
| count Google and Facebook tell you, you are getting.
| Advertisers just milk corporations. They dont care if the
| numbers are fake. They are now trained to tell everyone to
| spend more or you dont get attention someone else will.
|
| As Goldharber once famously said , about the Attention Economy
| - people have limited attention to give anything but infinite
| capacity to receive attention.
|
| No one likes to hear or believe they dont really have any
| influence when the system is signalling they do. So the ponzi
| scheme grows larger and larger.
|
| There is a great book about it (from an ex-googler) called the
| Subprime Attention Crisis.
|
| No one knows what to do about it so everyones head is buried
| deep in the sand.
|
| We need new attention allocation systems that are not market
| driven.
| addaon wrote:
| Interesting that they think they're out of internal projects and
| acquisitions to (profitably) spend money on. Even more
| interesting that the stock seems to agree -- I guess investors
| already believed that growth is over, and are seeing this
| recognition of that as an alignment between reality and internal
| strategy.
| summerlight wrote:
| The only major investment left would be computing
| infrastructures, but it's severely limited by supply. Even if
| Google wants to spend more money, simply there's no chips to
| buy. I don't see any significant future investment
| opportunities other than Waymo in the foreseeable future, but
| it seems still far from scaling out.
| addaon wrote:
| > Even if Google wants to spend more money, simply there's no
| chips to buy.
|
| This strongly suggests that there's an opportunity to spend
| money relaxing this shortage. If your business growth is
| being throttled by suppliers, then investment either allows
| you to grow those suppliers, or vertically integrate them out
| of the picture.
| utensil4778 wrote:
| You can't just create new supply. Chip fabs take multiple
| years to spool up. You also have to get the machines to
| make the chips and guess what, those are supply constrained
| too.
|
| It's not a problem you can simply spend money at, it's a
| global supply chain problem with many disparate companies
| each with their own constrained supply chains.
| summerlight wrote:
| Yeah, I think Google should be actively working on
| addressing shortage. But I don't think this can be solved
| in the short term even with infinite capitals since ASML is
| the fundamental bottleneck and everyone is competing for
| the same limited capacity.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Google is in the fortunate position of having their own in
| house AI compute modules (TPU's) that are more or less on par
| with Nvidia chips.
|
| They might have to compete for foundry time, but it's better
| than having to compete for AI chips.
| jankeymeulen wrote:
| There is a $6B increase in purchase of properties and
| equipment vs. 23Q1.
| lupire wrote:
| This is current position in the US economic cycle imposed by
| the Fed. High interest rate, low investment. Return to safety.
| nikhizzle wrote:
| A possible endgame of this quest for growth is just mixing
| unlabeled ads directly in with search content. Effectively pay
| for ranking with some quality filter. I'm pretty sure it won't
| come to that, but worse things have happened.
| dabeeeenster wrote:
| Like this doesnt happen already and hasnt been the case for the
| last 10 years?
| akomtu wrote:
| Injecting ads into the actual search results looks egregious
| today, but will be the norm later.
| amf12 wrote:
| Like this? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/reddit-
| sneaky-ai-spa...
| ls612 wrote:
| Up 15% after hours on news that they will begin a large cash
| dividend and share repurchase program.
| aeyes wrote:
| They have have been buying back stock for a very long time
| jeffbee wrote:
| In fact they announced the same-sized buyback authorization
| exactly 1 year ago.
| lupire wrote:
| How much of authorization was realized in actual purchase
| last year?
|
| Is this announcement a continuation of buybacks at the same
| rate, or just a renewal of the headroom?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Beats me. Their buybacks have accelerated over the last
| decade and were about $60B each of 22 and 23.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Congrats to Googlers
| killjoywashere wrote:
| Of all the people in this thread swearing they don't use Google,
| I wonder how many are writing their comments using Chrome (or
| Chromium, or Edge, or Brave, or Opera, or any other browser that
| uses the guts of the Chromium project)
| Liquix wrote:
| Eh, Firefox is blazing fast and readily available. Avoiding
| ReCaptcha on the other hand...
| psunavy03 wrote:
| "I don't use Facebook!" (goes off to check Instagram account)
| einpoklum wrote:
| I'd guess only a minority.
|
| However, we should also remember that Mozilla's main funder
| is... Google/Alphabet, via a royalty deal for having Google be
| the default search engine. See, e.g., here:
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-go...
|
| And while the royalties arrangement is not that old, Google was
| a main funder before that happened as well. FYI.
| christophilus wrote:
| I use DuckDuckGo for search, Apple Maps when on my iPhone, and
| Gnome Maps when on my computers. My main browser is Firefox,
| but I use Brave (Safari-based) on iOS due to better ad blocking
| there. I use local markdown files for all of my note taking,
| and Fastmail for email.
|
| But I am aware that I'm not typical.
| fooker wrote:
| Firefox is funded by Google.
|
| Apple gets billions from Google, funding quite a bit of their
| R&D.
|
| Most of the open source software you use including the Linux
| kernel has a bunch of contributors from Google.
|
| Going one step further, Google has a large hand in open
| standards for everything, from wifi to programming languages.
|
| I'm not saying you should avoid these, it's just interesting
| that you can take so many non-typical steps to avoid google
| and still mandatorily have them involved in all of your
| technology.
| shegerking2020 wrote:
| so much for all the google doomers. Just goes to show how
| unintuitive all of this things are
| advisedwang wrote:
| Google has been doing stock buybacks for years. Why are they
| pivoting to also doing a dividend too? Does a dividend give a
| bigger short term stock bump?
| didip wrote:
| Signaling that growth will be slower.
| einpoklum wrote:
| Extrapolated annually, that's about 320 Billion. Even if you want
| to normalize it by number of employees, it's it's over 1.7
| Million USD/capita .
|
| Capitalism is nuts.
| browningstreet wrote:
| What's impressive about growing the ads business (Meta too) is
| how difficult it is buy ads and make campaigns.
| pm2222 wrote:
| meta.ai and groq, even bing copilot work for me. Google usage for
| me has reduced a lot. As such I'm not optimistic about google's
| search business.
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