> The only thing he has done is not destroy the Google cash firehose.
Unfortunately, this recent LLM trend will seriously threaten it. If an LLM can provide the answer, then why would a user click to go to a website? And if there are no clicks to a website, why would the website curate the information? How will they make money? The long-term effects of how LLMs are integrated into Search are still unknown. Of course, MSFT would love to push Google into LLMs, as that hurts their ads business.
Also (as I mentioned in an earlier comment) he has been milking that cow a bit too much. The ad load on Google sites has gone through the roof. A fair(er) comparison of his performance would be to see how much revenue Google would make at the same ad load as in 2015. Any idiot can make 5x more revenue in the very short term by showing 20x more ads. That is not rocket science. What _is_ interesting is if you can do it without increasing the ad load. That's where the real magic lies.
Unfortunately, this recent LLM trend will seriously threaten it. If an LLM can provide the answer, then why would a user click to go to a website? And if there are no clicks to a website, why would the website curate the information? How will they make money? The long-term effects of how LLMs are integrated into Search are still unknown. Of course, MSFT would love to push Google into LLMs, as that hurts their ads business.
Also (as I mentioned in an earlier comment) he has been milking that cow a bit too much. The ad load on Google sites has gone through the roof. A fair(er) comparison of his performance would be to see how much revenue Google would make at the same ad load as in 2015. Any idiot can make 5x more revenue in the very short term by showing 20x more ads. That is not rocket science. What _is_ interesting is if you can do it without increasing the ad load. That's where the real magic lies.