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

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

#21

Post by withinboredom »

Google has no chance at having a “good” search engine. Ever. They are too big. If they come up with a new algorithm or alter the existing one, people will be gaming it in hours. The problem they face is signal-to-noise ratios, with all the noise, extracting the signal is quite difficult (especially with something subjective, like search).

They need to come up with a proxy for their signal, because whatever they are using right now just sucks. I switched to bing six months ago, and have had much better results.

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

#22

Post by II2II »

apsurd wrote: post #12

Curious why you end with "i'm just concerned"? so what if Google slowly implodes? Others are working hard to out compete them. All is well in the Universe.

Different people value different things. For some, stability and familiarity are important. While I am rather anti-corporation, it is also worth noting that there are people behind corporations: people who depend upon the institution, whether they are employees or customers.

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

#23

Post by leoc »

Your periodic reminder that Google is still under the full control of two guys, Page and Brin. They have (IANAL) substantially unlimited ability to impose whatever changes they want on the company. And in fact they are willing to pop up again when some challenge they care about, like "winning" AI, arises. Worse, Google escaped onerous regulations in its first decade or so partly because Google successfully sold the public and decision-makers on the idea that Page and Brin were decent guys who would be responsible stewards for Google. More fool the rest of us? Sure, but that's not much of an excuse for them. If Page and Brin got even ~7% of the rage and indignation and obsessive public attention that Musk gets the world would be a saner place. But Musk is constantly jumping up and down and jangling his keys for attention, while Page and Brin are out of sight, and we are failing this object-persistence challenge.

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

#24

Post by thomassmith65 » 

  >If some of you say they're focusing on "revenue" and "ads" then I don't think that is it. The reason I don't agree with it is due to being a short-term focus. If your search results are bad, people will start trusting you less over time and look for answers on platforms like Reddit or other search engines, therefore you can't show them relevant ads and you lose money over the long term.
In the long-term, we'll all be dead. In the medium-term, the people behind these user-hostile decisions will be at other companies, making yet more money. In the near-term, 'what about the stock price next quarter?'

Short-term thinking is a candidate for the biggest problem of our time.

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

#26

Post by [deleted] »

dageshi wrote: post #19

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.

[deleted]

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

#27

Post by fuzztester »

fuzztester wrote: post #10
danielovichdk wrote: post #3

I read the financial figures last week or so. They are earning more money than ever. I think Google knows search is over and that they know AI will bring something new to that game. So they are perhaps maintaining and not pouring too much into making the product better.

it is not that they are not caring to make it better. it is that they are making it steadily worse, to make more and more profits. don't ask me for proof, or why or how, because I won't answer, because that's a huge rabbit hole, but with tons of proof right here on hn, as well as on the rest of the net. just ... google for it. /irony intended

[flagged]

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

#29

Post by zzleeper »

> Following a short stint at the management consulting firm McKinsey & Co., Pichai joined Google in 2004,[9] where he led the product management and innovation efforts for a suite of Google's client software products, including Google Chrome and ChromeOS, as well as being largely responsible for Google Drive

Could be that he is a decent middle-to-upper manager but fails at strategic vision?

Also, I'm surprised at how trivially easy it was to switch from Google Search to Kagi (virtually from one day to another). I still other Google products (Android, Gmail, Youtube) but was quite surprised at how shallow their moat was (and so maybe I can just ditch Gmail for e.g. Fastmail?)

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

#30

Post by renegat0x0 »

I think that not only search has gotten worse. The Internet has also. It is full of spam, full of grifters, full of farms. Dead Internet has come true.

In pile of garbage it is hard to find interesting stuff.

That is why we have HN, reddits. We are trying to find interesting stuff using collective effort. In some cases, this collective effort also is being monetized, so people are disenchanted with such solutions.

You can create your own reddit clones, but it will not work our, because you do not have the user base / count.

I tried collecting domain names at least: https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

In my system I can use the data to find domains, so that when I search for github I find it, when I search for youtube I do not find a ton of minecraft videos.

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