Google Is All About Cost Control Now

Google is working hard to do more with less. How it does with a lot less remains to be seen. 

Its parent company, Alphabet Inc., posted decent first-quarter results late Tuesday—decent in the sense that overall revenue narrowly beat Wall Street’s dim expectations thanks to some surprising resilience in the core search advertising business and despite a continuing slump in YouTube ads. But the company’s total advertising revenue was still flat year over year. And while Google doesn’t give formal projections, it said on its conference call to discuss its quarterly results that “the outlook remains uncertain.”