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Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

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Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#251

Post by zild3d »

svnpenn wrote: post #99
greybox wrote: post #70

I switched to using kagi.com a while ago, and I've never looked back. I've tried to use duckduckgo before but just ended up using '!g' most of the time. Kagi is in a whole other league. It's on par with, if not better than google search. I highly recommend it. When they introduce the paid tier I'm sure as hell going to subscribe to it. At this point I would trade my Netflix subscription for it.

Please stop pushing some site thats still in beta, AND requires a login.

they didn't provide a link that got you login-walled, they mentioned a product that's working for them. Don't see why that's an issue

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#252

Post by inoffensivename »

evgen wrote: post #241
blagie wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The overall problem -- and this is not specific to Google -- is that managers at all levels are incentivized to grow head counts. Google has at least 10x as many employees as it needs. That's based on decades of revenue being decoupled from costs, and from monopoly profits. It's the double-whammy of being in tech (where costs and revenues don't couple since incremental costs are close to zero), and having a super-pro…

> The overall problem -- and this is not specific to Google -- is that managers at all levels are incentivized to grow head counts. No one is incentivised to grow head count. They are incentivised to do more, produce more revenue, and expand the reach of the company; most of these goals require the application of more smart people to a problem. They are not getting a promotion or salary bump because their group incre…

Respectfully, I think this is a little bit naive. While the job ladder doesn't explicitly specify org growth as a requirement to get ahead, leading more people is a classic way to get ahead as a relatively junior manager. If a manager's peers are all more senior but are leading similar sized or smaller orgs, it will seem natural that the junior manager should get promoted to the same level. Building orgs is a classic way for managers to get ahead.

Actually delivering value is a huge advantage too, but as far as I've seen is not prerequisite for getting ahead.

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#254

Post by dredmorbius »

bayareabadboy wrote: post #144

Has anyone else noticed a significant uptick in negative posts about google search lately? Is this because it’s gotten noticeably worse recently or it’s trendy to complain about? Thinking over the last six months or so.

An Algolia search for "google search" would suggest that there's more recent traffic amongst the most popular hits, though you can find complaints dating back over a decade.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google+search

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#255

Post by blagie »

evgen wrote: post #241
blagie wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The overall problem -- and this is not specific to Google -- is that managers at all levels are incentivized to grow head counts. Google has at least 10x as many employees as it needs. That's based on decades of revenue being decoupled from costs, and from monopoly profits. It's the double-whammy of being in tech (where costs and revenues don't couple since incremental costs are close to zero), and having a super-pro…

> The overall problem -- and this is not specific to Google -- is that managers at all levels are incentivized to grow head counts. No one is incentivised to grow head count. They are incentivised to do more, produce more revenue, and expand the reach of the company; most of these goals require the application of more smart people to a problem. They are not getting a promotion or salary bump because their group incre…

This is false:

- If I have a job at Google as an IC, I can look for IC jobs.

- If I have a job managing 10 people, I can get a manager-level job.

- If I have a job managing 100 people, I can get a director-level job.

- If I have a job managing 1000 people, I can look for a VP-level job.

- If I have a job managing 10,000 people, I can look for a C-suite job.

Average tenure in a position in the tech industry is around 3 years. No one will know or care what objectives a Google manager achieved, or whether those were hard or easy to achieve. If you want to grow rapidly in your career, the things which matter are:

- Connections, network, and references

- What shows up on an interview (e.g. self-improvement)

- What shows up on your CV (e.g. how many people you managed, or the brands you worked on)

The place techies get stuck in career growth is by trying to do the "right thing." By the time you're trying to rise to the top of a corporate ladder, the competition is extreme, and the people who succeed play the game as optimally as they can.

I might be able to look one level up. An IC might be able to manage a small team. However, your odds of having an IC move directly into the C-suite require nothing short of a miracle (a Nobel prize, being the author of Linux, or something similar).

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#256

Post by tome »

rg111 wrote: post #214
baxuz wrote: post #77

It's not a Google problem, it's a web problem. Everything is based around SEO spam. If someone has a website, and they're producing content, their point is to monetize the browsing of the website itself, or promote their main product via the website. This incentivizes a certain kind of content, which is marketing content. These days I'm back to searching social networks like Reddit or Hacker News for (at least somewh…

> It's not a Google problem Oh it is definitelt a Google problem. I was in mood yesterday and I tried Google versus Kagi and You Code. Results of N out of N queries in other search engines were miles better in other search engines than Google. I have now switched completely to code.you.com and Kagi from Google. They are ready.

Kagi is jaw-droppingly amazing. With Google search quality declining, Bing being on average 95% as good as Google, and DuckDuckGo being 90% as good, I was doubting there was any way that search engines would ever improve. Kagi has removed that doubt completely. I ask for stuff and it finds it. I couldn't believe there could be such a useful product.

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#257

Post by colordrops »

l33t2328 wrote: post #183
makecheck wrote: post #138

Well whether you add “site:.edu” or not, Google still does the thing where they just spit out a pile of extra “matches” that don’t contain your search phrase AT ALL . Just thrown into the list, as if they have any business being there (oh wait, they do have business: Google’s business). Frankly, if it’s not reliable as a tool, it has no real value and I can’t believe it has come to this. Imagine if every time you ran…

> Frankly, if it’s not reliable as a tool, it has no real value This is exactly the ridiculous kind of hyperbole I come to HN for. If you honestly can’t find any value in using Google despite its unreliability, you were probably expecting too much of it to begin with.

Your expectations are too low. We all remember google in it's heyday when it returned honest results, so we know what's possible.

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#258

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

blagie wrote: post #234
stickfigure wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes no sense. You make it sound like Google has no financial incentive to fix this problem, which is patently false. Google isn't selling the organic search results, which is what this article talks about. The problem is that Google is engaged in a war with SEO optimizers, and losing (or at least, barely breaking even). No business model will fix that. It's a hard problem that any successful search engine will…

"Google" is 100+k people. "Google" doesn't respond to incentives; individuals do. A typical employee at any large company is incentivized to: - Maximize their salary - Maximize their future earnings potential (e.g. CV) - Have fun - Have work-life balance ... and so on. That goes all the way up to the CEO. Pretending a corporation thinks and responds to incentives is folly. Running a corporation like Google is like he…

Did you write that, or did your 85 billion (approx.) neurons?

Corporations are intelligent, sentient entities which act on incentives. They don't have a conscious sense of self, but then neither do many natural organisms. That doesn't keep them from responding to their environment as if they're aware of it, and acting in incentive-driven ways.

Corporations seeking to maximise profits are exactly like humans attempting to maximise income. The problem is that corporations - like humans - have the wrong incentives, further diminished by limited predictive ability and poor heuristics.

So maladaptive behaviours emerge and stick. Both humans and corporations find a nice local minimum and don't move from it.

More intelligent behaviour would be able to predict and avoid existential threats without having to experience them first. But it's a question of predictive ability, not a binary absence of all intelligence.

So it's not that Google can't do better because it has too many employees. It can't do better because its cultural heuristics - which include it internal culture and the external culture it operates in - don't allow it to.

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#259

Post by DrewADesign »

baggachipz wrote: post #13

Google is so unbearable because they are no longer interested in you finding the answer to your query; they're interested in selling your query and its context to the highest bidder. That conflict of interest manifests in what Google has become.

While obviously not universally true, this bothers me about a large swath of current UX culture and it’s pushing me towards other types of design. Anyone who’s heard a UX conference keynote in the past ten years would think UX folks go into work every day making unbiased data, using it to identify users’ genuine needs, and championing those needs at every stage of product development. Sure, the suits call the shots, but does our software landscape indicate anybody really does that?

Many product folks just don’t seem honest, even with themselves, about what benefits users. Do you really think your users benefit from ”more relevant” advertisements? Because your users don’t. Are new services and content so beneficial to users that they’d forfeit their privacy to fund it? If so, why obfuscate your having made that choice for them? Why not make it opt-in? Does that dialog box popping up just at the right time really give that overstimulated and frustrated user a choice? Either answer those kinds of questions honestly or admit that you’re just finding the smoothest path to maximize revenue. The hypocrisy is infuriating.

Give me a break.

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#260

Post by mhmmbt »

Technical solutions are not going to fix a political problem.

Sundar has been quoted as saying “they are a business first” and a businesses political obligation is make profit for the owners.

These companies and technologies are meant to serve human beings, not a mathematical ideal in programmers heads.

While: $makeMoney == $howSocietyWorks; return $getUsedToIt

Ooh but politics is boring!

Only 13% of adults in the US have an advanced degree. Coddled engineers live in an emotional bubble ignoring the very real world that does not feel an obligation to a minority of coddled engineers.

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