It also highlight that Google really isn’t about search, all they care about is advertising and making users profiles.
A paid search API seems like it would be easy money for Google. And maybe some lock-in for all sorts of start-ups and enterprises.
There are so many apps that would benefit from search.
I get that it means they can't serve ads.
But you've got to be willing to disrupt yourself or you'll lose eventually anyway.
Better to figure out how to make money from ads and an API, than to cower in fear.
That same fear may be why they failed to be first movers in LLMs.
Have to be willing to disrupt yourself.
At the same time, I've never built a billion dollar company. So I'm absolutely armchair quarterbacking here.
We should have outlawed targeted advertising and Google should have been broken up under antitrust a long time ago.
Easy enough to run the ad-engine over the query, estimate the ad revenue, and bill the user the value of the lost revenue.
They are free to recoup that by serving their own ads or even using Google's ad services.
Exactly why it seems to make sense to be willing to disrupt yourself.
There are so many ways to still make money.
But, I'd be willing to bet that avoiding self-disruption increases the likelihood of failure over longer timescales.