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Starting in ~2020 I established a 3-4% position in Google. I eliminated the position this week. Here's why: as a business, Google is an advertising company but from a consumer-facing view, they are a utility. For a utility business to function the product has to be utile and it has to have the trust of its users. I suspect this trust is eroding - and along with it, slowly, the business.

As they say, you're not paranoid if they really are out to get you. In recent years it has been fashionable for those on the political right to claim a left-wing bias coming from tech companies. With its recent Gemini train wreck, Google has now shown that this claim has at least some merit - and very specifically, merit with respect to Google.

From a technical perspective, I can see how a well-intentioned desire to make AI-generated images look like the company's user base could produce amusingly incongruous results such as an Indian-female pope (albeit only if all other values are subordinate to that one). However, in my opinion, the results from the AI text search cannot be an accident and speak to a company culture that is indeed willing to place favored political outcomes over the accuracy and utility of the consumer-facing product. I not aware of any evidence that political bias has been found in the main search product - but would you really be surprised?

Data point: my seventy-something, non-tech-savy, conservative-but-not-crazy mother is now using DuckDuckGo. The plural of anecdote is data and I'm sure Google - and many an investor - is busy calculating how many users are being lost. As the company points out in its anti-trust filings, the competition is only a click away.

In light of this, do I continue to think Google will be an outstanding business? Better than just buying a tech index like QQQE? I do not. It's a shame. As Warren Buffett has said, “If you lose money for the firm, I will be forgiving. If you lose reputation, I will be ruthless.” This week I fired Sundar Pichai.

Levendis

I've been using the 'Google is woke' blowback to add substantially to my position. The Gemini release was a real slip up, but I doubt it matters 5 - 10 years from now.

Briefly, my thesis is that the competition is not just a click away.

U.S. hyper partisanship may be able to make a Bud consumer a Coors, etc. consumer, long term, I don't know. They're both bland beers, so the choice at the corner store doesn't mean much, and the Americana of it all was all part of Bud messaging, from what I understand anyways (I've lived in the US, but am not a citizen), so maybe the idea that 'real Americans' drink Modello has some purchase.

Jim Jordan is up on Congress & on Fox News decrying woke Google and suggesting some clandestine plot with Joe Biden and the Democratic party, but he has a YouTube channel, and isn't getting rid of it anytime soon. If he's one of the many who has gmail, or uses Chrome, or has Android, I suspect those habits won't change easily either. Waymo just got some big news, soon enough he may even take a Waymo, perhaps without even identifying it as an Alphabet product.

I've used DuckDuckGo before for reasons of principle (privacy rights concerns). I have no great love for Google as a corporation. The main problem was it was just so convenient to slowly wade back to Google (what's that? I can just search in my chrome browser?). And if we're taking about AI, I certainly wouldn't be thinking MSFT was a better corporate actor.

Do the big tech companies (X now excepted -- how's business going?) have an anti-Republican bent? Yes. They're full of youngish college graduates & non-whites, not to mention immigrants. The core of the Republican base is now white evangelicals and non-college educated white men. I've lived in Silicon Valley, and have friends and colleagues who are in some major roles with the big players, including over in Seattle (that draws heavily from the SV & SF talent pool). It is not a 'culture' that is particularly open to the modal Trump or Republican voter, and it won't be anytime soon.

Is this a Google specific 'problem'? If it is (I highly doubt it), and Gemini slip up aside, I suspect it's more of an advantage than a disadvantage, to be honest. This isn't slinging beer to American men.

I've been using the 'Google is woke' blowback to add substantially to my position. The Gemini release was a real slip up, but I doubt it matters 5 - 10 years from now.

Being identified as the woke search engine by lots of conservative commentators is obviously not helpful. David Sacks, the conservative/libertarian tech bro, imagines DEI "commissars" at Google who, like Communist Party commissars of the old Soviet Union, can suppress dissent through intimidation. If that were true, it would be a serious problem, but Sundar Pichai's response to the recent embarrassments provides some hope that he understands the process needs fixing. There have been some embarrassing results at Chat GPT as well, although not to this extent. These are early days.

The bigger problem in my opinion is the evolution of search from links, which can be bought as advertising, to text, which does not lend itself to embedded advertising quite as seamlessly. A new offering called Perplexity is recently fashionable in Silicon Valley. I created a permanent tab for it and now I go there when I want a text answer to a query. It embeds footnotes in its answers which can be clicked to generate the source material. I have only the free version, but I've been impressed by its usefulness. There are still times when I want links and use Google, but when I need something explained, I'm increasingly trying Perplexity first.

I tried an experiment this morning, asking both Perplexity and Gemini to name the Best Picture nominees at this year's Oscars (which air tonight). Perplexity responded with a full list of the 10 nominees in a couple of seconds. Gemini wavered for several seconds, then produced this:

The official nominees for Best Picture at the 97th Academy Awards haven't been announced yet. However, awards season is underway and some films are generating buzz. Here are a few of the titles considered to be frontrunners:

The Holdovers
Oppenheimer
American Fiction
Maestro
The Zone of Interest

It's important to note that this is not an exhaustive list and surprises can always happen. You can find out the official nominees closer to the ceremony date, which usually takes place in February.

Gemini's guesses were all right, but it missed the other five nominees. Oscar nominations were announced in late January, so it would seem Gemini is not as up to date as Perplexity. It may be that you need the paid version to get the most recent results. That's true of Chat GPT. But I seem to be getting real-time results from the free version of Perplexity. Just one data point, but it confirms my general feeling that Perplexity is a better answer bot at the moment.

My concern is that when you have a 92% market share, as Google does in search, there's nowhere to go but down. I imagine in 10 years we'll look back at lists of links as the first, most primitive stage of search. Google certainly has the resources to keep up with, if not lead the second stage, fueled by generative AI, but the chances of its market share slipping a bit as alternatives proliferate seem pretty high to me.

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