Prabhakar Raghavan, of Google Inc., speaks during the company’s Cloud Next ’18 event in San Francisco, California, July 24, 2018.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
As Google fights claims that it violated antitrust law to maintain its online search dominance, the company’s search lead testified Thursday that young users mock Google as old-fashioned.
Prabhakar Raghavan, a Google senior vice president responsible for for products including search, ads and commerce, said that some young users have referred to the search engine as “Grandpa Google.”
He explained that the term refers to the idea that while Google might be fine to ask a question about homework, young users would prefer to take their more interesting queries elsewhere.
It’s not entirely clear where Raghavan saw the term. Searching “Grandpa Google” on social media sites like TikTok yields videos and memes of grandparents searching for information.
The comment is indicative of a key theme of Raghavan’s testimony, which marked the official first day of Google’s presentation of its defense against claims from the Department of Justice and a group of state attorneys general that it violated antitrust law. The government spent over a month presenting its case alleging that Google illegally leveraged its dominance to maintain its monopoly in search. It’s defined Google’s competitors in search as a handful of much smaller general search engines like Microsoft’s Bing or DuckDuckGo.
But Raghavan testified that threats to Google’s position are very much real and extend far beyond competitors that closely mirror its functions. He said that innovation in the search engine is what has allowed it to maintain market share.
Raghavan testified that Yahoo’s search dominance at one point seemed insurmountable. But, he said, Google was eventually able to surpass Yahoo through better ranking as well as innovations in the search product. For example, Google has conducted research that’s led to features that let it directly answer users’ questions, understand voice queries and lens queries, where users search via a photo they take.
Now that most consumers have a smartphone, users often conduct searches within their own apps, Raghavan said. He gave the example of booking a vacation, where users might use a variety of apps to book their flights and amenities.
“We don’t see users carrying through these journeys entirely on Google,” Raghavan testified. “They go in and out and spend a lot of time on these other platforms.”
When it comes to specialized vertical search engines, such as Yelp or Expedia, Raghavan said, “I see myself as competing with them every day.”
Commercial search is also important to Google, Raghavan said. Amazon is one of the companies that he said he closely watches.
“For Google to be a successful company, we should be good at answering any kind of query, including commercial queries,” Raghavan said. “I believe that if we become second class … we become irrelevant over time.”
Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerstner said Thursday that he’s moving out of the “bomb shelter” with Nvidia and into a position of safety, expecting that the chipmaker is positioned to withstand President Donald Trump’s widespread tariffs.
“The growth and the demand for GPUs is off the charts,” he told CNBC’s “Fast Money Halftime Report,” referring to Nvidia’s graphics processing units that are powering the artificial intelligence boom. He said investors just need to listen to commentary from OpenAI, Google and Elon Musk.
President Trump announced an expansive and aggressive “reciprocal tariff” policy in a ceremony at the White House on Wednesday. The plan established a 10% baseline tariff, though many countries like China, Vietnam and Taiwan are subject to steeper rates. The announcement sent stocks tumbling on Thursday, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq down more than 5%, headed for its worst day since 2022.
The big reason Nvidia may be better positioned to withstand Trump’s tariff hikes is because semiconductors are on the list of exceptions, which Gerstner called a “wise exception” due to the importance of AI.
Nvidia’s business has exploded since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, and annual revenue has more than doubled in each of the past two fiscal years. After a massive rally, Nvidia’s stock price has dropped by more than 20% this year and was down almost 7% on Thursday.
Gerstner is concerned about the potential of a recession due to the tariffs, but is relatively bullish on Nvidia, and said the “negative impact from tariffs will be much less than in other areas.”
He said it’s key for the U.S. to stay competitive in AI. And while the company’s chips are designed domestically, they’re manufactured in Taiwan “because they can’t be fabricated in the U.S.” Higher tariffs would punish companies like Meta and Microsoft, he said.
“We’re in a global race in AI,” Gerstner said. “We can’t hamper our ability to win that race.”
YouTube on Thursday announced new video creation tools for Shorts, its short-form video feed that competes against TikTok.
The features come at a time when TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, is at risk of an effective ban in the U.S. if it’s not sold to an American owner by April 5.
Among the new tools is an updated video editor that allows creators to make precise adjustments and edits, a feature that automatically syncs video cuts to the beat of a song and AI stickers.
The creator tools will become available later this spring, said YouTube, which is owned by Google.
Along with the new features, YouTube last week said it was changing the way view counts are tabulated on Shorts. Under the new guidelines, Shorts views will count the number of times the video is played or replayed with no minimum watch time requirement.
Previously, views were only counted if a video was played for a certain number of seconds. This new tabulation method is similar to how views are counted on TikTok and Meta’s Reels, and will likely inflate view counts.
“We got this feedback from creators that this is what they wanted. It’s a way for them to better understand when their Shorts have been seen,” YouTube Chief Product Officer Johanna Voolich said in a YouTube video. “It’s useful for creators who post across multiple platforms.”
CEO of Meta and Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk attend the inauguration ceremony before Donald Trump is sworn in as the 47th U.S. president in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in Washington, Jan. 20, 2025.
Saul Loeb | Via Reuters
Technology stocks plummeted Thursday after President Donald Trump’s new tariff policies sparked widespread market panic.
Apple led the declines among the so-called “Magnificent Seven” group, dropping nearly 9%. The iPhone maker makes its devices in China and other Asian countries. The stock is on pace for its steepest drop since 2020.
Other megacaps also felt the pressure. Meta Platforms and Amazon fell more than 7% each, while Nvidia and Tesla slumped more than 5%. Nvidia builds its new chips in Taiwan and relies on Mexico for assembling its artificial intelligence systems. Microsoft and Alphabet both fell about 2%.
The drop in technology stocks came amid a broader market selloff spurred by fears of a global trade war after Trump unveiled a blanket 10% tariff on all imported goods and a range of higher duties targeting specific countries after the bell Wednesday. He said the new tariffs would be a “declaration of economic independence” for the U.S.
Companies and countries worldwide have already begun responding to the wide-sweeping policy, which included a 34% tariff on China stacked on a previous 20% tax, a 46% duty on Vietnam and a 20% levy on imports from the European Union.
China’s Ministry of Commerce urged the U.S. to “immediately cancel” the unilateral tariff measures and said it would take “resolute counter-measures.”
The tariffs come on the heels of a rough quarter for the tech-heavy Nasdaq and the worst period for the index since 2022. Stocks across the board have come under pressure over concerns of a weakening U.S. economy. The Nasdaq Composite dropped nearly 5% on Thursday, bringing its year-to-date loss to 13%.
Trump applauded some megacap technology companies for investing money into the U.S. during his speech, calling attention to Apple’s plan to spend $500 billion over the next four years.