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.

It's going to take a long time for alternatives to make inroads into Google.

There are lots of marketing dollars looking for a home, and Google is going to be one of the better bets for some time to come.

They may turn into a zombie but they won't die for a long, long time.

For example, cable companies still exist and have a ton of paid ads on them.

Fox makes $3-5B in sales per quarter: https://valustox.com/FOXA

Sinclair isn't doing so good but they're still selling in the hundreds of millions per Q: https://valustox.com/SBGI

> 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

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)

Wow they announced their first-ever dividend (following Meta which announced theirs last quarter).

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.

Personally I use google more/just as much for product searches; stores selling X, finding comparison sites, going to the manufacturers page for a product.

That and restaurants from maps.

I use it less for information based searches, but that almost seems to be a win from an advertiser perspective.

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?

Up 15% after hours on news that they will begin a large cash dividend and share repurchase program.

Sundar Pichai, CEO, said: “Our results in the first quarter reflect strong performance from Search, YouTube and Cloud. We are well under way with our Gemini era and there’s great momentum across the company. Our leadership in AI research and infrastructure, and our global product footprint, position us well for the next wave of AI innovation.”

The only one mention, it's strong position across conservative approach. A must have for any large multi national company like Google.

Congrats to Googlers

End of the day, for shareholders this is what matters. Not what products were killed, how many people were laid off, what ethical dilemmas employees face etc. are a distraction for them. This is what it has to come down to. It's not wrong.

so much for all the google doomers. Just goes to show how unintuitive all of this things are

Fascinating that they’re issuing a dividend. Can’t find anything better to do to drive growth?

The dividend is interesting. Why not spend that to further grow new businesses for Google? Is it signaling that they're not unfairly using strength in one market to take over another?

Oh wow, I didn’t know their domain name is abc.xyz, that’s beautiful.

They really live or die by Ad revenue...

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.

Stock is +13% after hours so far.

Looks like all those $ that pushed down META are flooding into GOOG.

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.

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.