No? Decreased search quality will reduce the number of searches people are doing which redcues the amount of ads Google can show. Decreased searches can come from not only people switching to another search engine, but also from people using the web less. Why look up something on the web when you can watch TikTok for a few hours?
> No? Decreased search quality will reduce the number of searches people are doing which redcues the amount of ads Google can show.
I’m willing to bet that >90% of Google Search users aren’t even aware that alternatives exist.
They are not suddenly going to stop using Google Search. There might even be a significant short-term increase in usage, for example, if they really need to go to page 5 to find the first relevant result.
That is very far from my experience with non-tech people. My friends and students always google something, and almost inevitably fail to find it. Then they do it again, and again, and again.
Over two years now I see specifically two people deterministically failing to find stuff through G search, and yet they still start with it in an almost Pavlovian ritual. Sometimes they will desperately scroll down, click on a blatantly irrelevant result and switch to facebook or some other bookmark aggregator of theirs to continue their brutally inefficient search process, thumb flick after thumb flick after thumb flick.
You're right, but you're thinking long term sustainability. That's not Google's current goal, they'd rather squeeze out as much profit as possible in a short term, then current shareholders can sell their stock to idiots who become bag holders.
