Does Sundar Pichai/Search team know how bad Google search is?

right. see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41156028

Look up value creation vs value extraction.

It explains why every tech product is eventually doomed to shittification and opens the doors to competition

Value creation is when you have a new thing and people are adopting. You grow by more people using. Think Google photos offering free unlimited photo storage.

As some point you saturate the market. Then to keep growing you shift to value extraction. Going back to example above, now photos/videos count toward your 15 GB Google limit.

Sundar appears to be an excellent extractor, hence why Google has never done better financially but completely missed the boat on AI. AI is now the new wave of value creation.

If Google's search results had gotten comparatively worse people would have switched and Google's revenue and market-share doesn't seem to indicate that this is the case, neither does my personal experience. Everything is full of spam, people keep clicking on it and if they didn't search engines would probably serve other content. That's not really a Google specific issue, that's just the internet today.

TL;DR: yes + "He's not a tinkerer, he's a bureaucrat." leads to paralysis. Nothing gets off the ground long enough to matter. Too scared.

Here's some random lore I saw repeated recently on Blind, left Google a year ago, didn't work on search, not sure how true it is.

The old head, Benedict Gomes, was somewhat against using "the ML algo said so" in the "make a change, test it, see if it has positive impact, deploy" cycle. Thesis was, after N deployed algos you never understood in the first place, you've lost control of the whole thing and can't go back.

The new head, Prabhakar, is widely derided as a leader in the mold of Sundar: don't rock the boat, platitudes, and when moved in as the head, he was all on board with "lets go full bore on ML!!!"

The idea is the guy who built a substantial part of Google-as-we-know-it was pushed out for the guy who "built" Yahoo, and only because he was a yes man (note this was pre-ChatGPT, so it wasn't slavishly AI-for-AIs-sake). Now they've reached the scenario Gomes was afraid of, and there's nothing you can do.

This is such a compelling and easy narrative I wonder how true it is. But there's also ~0 more evidence I can ask for, these are people who definitely work on it discussing it amongst themselves, without outside influence, without any incentive to lie or exaggerate about it.

In general, the problem I saw at Google was it was a powder-keg of high achievers that was shifting mix evermore towards "Ivy League who took the job because its a high paying job", and what I perceived as a rich person thing that it is gauche to care, much less care and raise issues you're not responsible for.

There was an extreme, absurd, aversion to any conflict that let sociopaths and yesmen thrive. In retrospect, I'm not sure this is any different than any other corporation. Before I encountered my resident sociopath, I would have said it was all whiner talk, blaming things on other people. Then I saw it, and started doing peer counselling, and the stories I heard...phew.

There's not much left worth searching.

LLM's are choking the web with slop and were you insane enough to actually write something useful and publish it you'd just be feeding the LLM's to directly compete against you with your own regurgitated work.

The web's dead in the format we've all known it, its corpse just hasn't hit the floor yet.