If you're depending on the continued existence of any Google product beyond GMail, Google Cloud and advertising you should really consider fallback positions. The existence of Youtube is also guaranteed, but the existence of any particular API or service that you might depend on? Not so much. Hell they'd probably consider killing GMail if they didn't need the accounts to tie advertising impressions to individuals.
That's a ton of money, (and I've heard that they paid Apple even more last year) but it's kind of understandable. Apple customers don't usually have android phones snitching on them, are less likely to use chrome, and tend to have their devices and data in the Apple ecosystem. Google has fewer ways to spy on Apple user's lives and push ads at them. Search, gmail, and youtube probably give them the best opportunities. I wouldn't doubt that Apple users are getting as frustrated with Google's search engine as everyone else is though.
Google used to need Search in order to learn about the intimate details of our lives. It's how they knew what we were interested in, what our medical problems were, what we were learning, and what we were thinking about.
Now they have chrome giving google people's entire browsing history, android devices collecting realtime data on what people are doing offline, where they are and who they are with. Google also has products like fitbit, nest, and gmail that gather still more data for google. Google doesn't need Search to spy on us anymore, so they haven't invested in keeping it useful.
In fact, it's better for google if you can't find what you want and have to make multiple searches for information because it gives them more chances to throw ads at you, and the harder it is for people to find websites using Search the more sites might feel like they have no choice but to pay Google to keep them at the top of the search results.
People who find Search increasingly useless though are turning to alternatives and for many people AI could end up replacing google's Search product as the first thing they turn to.
I would not count on Search staying around forever.
They need search for different reasons: it's their biggest moat against Meta by being the start page of the internet for a great many number of people. A whole lot of browsing sessions start with search and end with search, and this way Google can claim attribution for virtually every traffic a website gets outside of direct hits.
This keeps people developing content to please Google and running ads on Google platforms to get more traffic.
Yup. Search is gradually (for about 15 years now) being transitioned from a search feature to a self-serve ad-requesting platform. “Show up, type a term, and we will select 10 ads for you.”
> for many people AI could end up replacing google's Search product
The quality of Google search lately has felt pretty meh, especially for generic topics that get hits for crummy blogspam. Google’s own AI results at the top are pretty much the thing keeping me there atm aside from inertia. My personal browser is on DDG which is fine just a tad slow comparatively
It's not as if they can't/don't also push ads at people in gmail, in youtube, Google maps, on android devices (phones, TVs, chromebooks, etc), in chrome, and they still have AdMob and AdSense and the Google Display Network
