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The time filter in Google Search broke a few days ago

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Re: The time filter in Google Search broke a few days ago

#21

Post by embedding-shape »

kristopolous wrote: post #17

I really don't understand this stuff. I've run multiple companies, this stuff would be fixed in minutes if it happened and very likely never get released. Aren't they hiring supposedly top-tier talent and paying them top-dollar? Surely they have a test suite and surely this would fail in that test suite. I really don't understand how they end up doing such things. I can only imagine that they hire a bunch of 22 year…

> Aren't they hiring supposedly top-tier talent and paying them top-dollar?

Yes. But you assume they work on pesky things like "bug fixing" which is generally not how you get promoted, and since these people are basically all about the money, stuff like that doesn't get fixed.

> Surely they have a test suite and surely this would fail in that test suite.

Surely, but surely it doesn't, because then the deploy would be blocked, surely. More often than not, insufficient automated testing for the not-happy/average path tends to be what lets bug like this leak into production.

> that they hire a bunch of 22 year olds from prestigious schools who have never had a job

Indeed, because these people have nothing to compare to, they don't know why they feel so depressed, distracted or out of motivation even though they have "the best job in world", and even though deep inside they know what they contribute to is slowly making the world a worse place to live.

Re: The time filter in Google Search broke a few days ago

#22

Post by polotics »

StilesCrisis wrote: post #6
vintagedave wrote: post #2

Sometimes I wonder what testing these giant companies do for features. A week ago Facebook's language translation broke. Results come back in the original language or a mix. How could no-one notice?

Google typically has very, very thorough tests. I don't have any insider information here, but it's likely that the creator of this menu is long gone (it looks old!) and this feature is in maintenance mode. Someone--or a bot--just trying to keep the build green may have disabled the test without understanding that it was pointing to a real issue.

So does your interpretation then also mean that a planned deprecation of Search has started, with well-timed reliability deprecations, so that users are deliberately being taught to rely only on AI summaries?

Re: The time filter in Google Search broke a few days ago

#23

Post by browningstreet »

The advanced search on Google is still pretty hard to remember how to use if you don’t use it very regularly.

I just did a Google search with “show me search results for fonts on hacker news from the last week” and while the AI Mode results were accurate, I wouldn’t call them search results. The search results were very much not accurate (results from May).

Weird that they couldn’t or wouldn’t solve this for the creamy middle.

Re: The time filter in Google Search broke a few days ago

#24

Post by lazide »

kristopolous wrote: post #17

I really don't understand this stuff. I've run multiple companies, this stuff would be fixed in minutes if it happened and very likely never get released. Aren't they hiring supposedly top-tier talent and paying them top-dollar? Surely they have a test suite and surely this would fail in that test suite. I really don't understand how they end up doing such things. I can only imagine that they hire a bunch of 22 year…

the culture has been eating itself from the inside out with narcissitic bullshit for a decade+ now.

Re: The time filter in Google Search broke a few days ago

#25

Post by gumby »

kristopolous wrote: post #17

I really don't understand this stuff. I've run multiple companies, this stuff would be fixed in minutes if it happened and very likely never get released. Aren't they hiring supposedly top-tier talent and paying them top-dollar? Surely they have a test suite and surely this would fail in that test suite. I really don't understand how they end up doing such things. I can only imagine that they hire a bunch of 22 year…

For quite a long time the company has been oriented around product managers who are paid for shipping something new, not for any sort of maintenance (occasionally posts appear on HN from people who got a poor performance review because they weren’t building visible new features and instead spent time fixing bugs). This is also why so many products are killed that it’s become a meme: the company’s incentives drive this behavior.

Re: The time filter in Google Search broke a few days ago

#27

Post by StilesCrisis »

polotics wrote: post #22
StilesCrisis wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google typically has very, very thorough tests. I don't have any insider information here, but it's likely that the creator of this menu is long gone (it looks old!) and this feature is in maintenance mode. Someone--or a bot--just trying to keep the build green may have disabled the test without understanding that it was pointing to a real issue.

So does your interpretation then also mean that a planned deprecation of Search has started, with well-timed reliability deprecations, so that users are deliberately being taught to rely only on AI summaries?

A draw-down of staff at Google? Have you been following the layoff news? Yes, Google is pivoting right now. Search isn't going away, but its shape is changing.

Re: The time filter in Google Search broke a few days ago

#28

Post by StilesCrisis »

embedding-shape wrote: post #9
StilesCrisis wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google typically has very, very thorough tests. I don't have any insider information here, but it's likely that the creator of this menu is long gone (it looks old!) and this feature is in maintenance mode. Someone--or a bot--just trying to keep the build green may have disabled the test without understanding that it was pointing to a real issue.

> trying to keep the build green may have disabled the test without understanding > Google typically has very, very thorough tests. Yeah, sure sounds like they have figured out this whole testing thing perfectly well, if that's the case :)

Companies in general right now seem to be reducing staff to "just barely enough" right now and seeing what they can get away with. Twitter started it, and when they didn't implode (as I thought they would), everyone is following their lead.
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