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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?

#51

Post by tennisflyi »

FrankWilhoit wrote: post #33

The real question is, what does Pichai himself (or his peers) use for search?

This is a problem rampant in tech (and pretty much any other industry). Why do you think he searches for anything? Do you think Khosrowshahi uses Uber himself and not a dedicated driver? Do you think Chesky books houses off Airbnb and not some sort of personal network? Do you think Xu DoorDashes shit fast food to his house and not a personal/private chef? Does McMillon of Walmart have chaff from Walmart delivered via a third party though Spark to his multi-million dollar house? This extends almost all the way down to interns of the company.

There is too much separation/abstraction from the people that actually use what they're in charge of. How many times does leadership make shit changes that fuck over the rank and file/boots on the ground?

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

#52

Post by majewsky »

readthenotes1 wrote: post #45
thomassmith65 wrote: post #24

>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 b…

Of any time...

Not really. There are a lot of points in history where the bigger problem was long-term thinking, as in: emperors expending the lives of tens of thousands of their subjects on the battlefield in order to achieve glory beyond death.

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

#53

Post by FrankWilhoit »

tennisflyi wrote: post #51
FrankWilhoit wrote: post #33

The real question is, what does Pichai himself (or his peers) use for search?

This is a problem rampant in tech (and pretty much any other industry). Why do you think he searches for anything? Do you think Khosrowshahi uses Uber himself and not a dedicated driver? Do you think Chesky books houses off Airbnb and not some sort of personal network? Do you think Xu DoorDashes shit fast food to his house and not a personal/private chef? Does McMillon of Walmart have chaff from Walmart delivered via…

Of course he delegates but he still needs the information -- the public incarnation of his own product is not fit for that purpose -- what does he tell his people to use?

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

#54

Post by tim333 »

Maybe I'm part of the problem in that I don't really have a problem. It works for most stuff for me. I don't get upset if there are some irrelevant results. I use ublock on the ads.

Maybe a lot of the users are like me and don't really have a issue? Do you have an example of something the search didn't work for?

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

#55

Post by huksley »

I think everybody at Google knows, they just blame on how shitty Internet has become, hence bad search results.

And then come other metrics like ads placement revenue etc. and you are blinded. And they really don't care of some rant by one sophisticated engineer, because average person is ok with state of things and does not think about switching to anything installed on the mobile device by default.

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

#56

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

aaannnddd ...

>but with tons of proof right here on hn

less than 24 hours after I said that, hot off the hn press, comes:

Google Loses DOJ Antirust Suit Over Search Engine on Phones:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41164240

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

#57

Post by xk_id »

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.

So where do people publish their original stuff now to shield it from LLMs? I’ve been looking at different options and I guess the Gemini protocol is maybe the best option for now?

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

#58

Post by readthenotes1 »

majewsky wrote: post #52
readthenotes1 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of any time...

Not really. There are a lot of points in history where the bigger problem was long-term thinking, as in: emperors expending the lives of tens of thousands of their subjects on the battlefield in order to achieve glory beyond death.

I'm pretty sure Xenophan wouldn't have felt inclined to add the advice "in times of plenty save for times of dearth" in the Cyropedia if it were unnecessary advice...

I could probably find many more points of short -sighted decisions (e.g., Marcus Aurelius letting his son inherit, Sam Johnson not regularizing spelling because it was too much work, Daniel Webster changing spelling to make a point and a $) if we had to go try to list

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

#59

Post by thomassmith65 »

readthenotes1 wrote: post #45
thomassmith65 wrote: post #24

>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 b…

Of any time...

Fair point, but I had in mind the particular flavor of short-term thinking that we see post-2010.

We had a couple decades, prior to that, when there was a business trend to be 'customer focused' which closely relates to long-term thinking: win good-will from your customers, from your suppliers, from your community... even from your competitors.

To whatever extent the customer-focus trend managed to saturate, it seems to have died with the success of FA*NG companies around 15 years ago.

Why bother making products that last when Apple makes billions with irreparable devices?

Why bother providing stellar customer service when Google hardly bothers to provide any customer service?

Why care about high quality design and materials when when Amazon just sells cheap knockoffs made from wax and scotch tape?

Why even be lawful, when Facebook can snow the public and regulators and not wind up in jail?

Short-term thinking has plagued various areas of life forever, certainly, but this FA*NG-era death of customer focus is why I feel things are particularly bad now.

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

#60

Post by xp84 »

minimaxir wrote: post #7

Bad search results doesn't necessarily mean less profitable search results, however counterintuitive that is. Google's incentives are different from the incentives of the websites surfaced through Google Search, unfortunately.

I genuinely think that Google, organizationally and strategically, sees organic results as an annoyance and a legacy liability.

Ideally, Google would prefer that you show up, type a search term, and are surfaced a variety of “answers.” Some of them would be in the form of ads, others would be in the form of YouTube links so you can see ads there, and others would be in the form of closed-ended solutions which completely satisfy your query with no need or ability to click. All of the options, crucially, should keep you on Google’s own real estate.

If I’m right, you can expect the organic search results to continue their trend of de-prioritization. They’ve already been pushed below the fold on most types of queries. Next, you should see them buried in a collapsible widget with an unappealing name, like “view unverified results.” The next stage is probably to remove that section entirely but with a user profile preference to restore it, followed by full deprecation, which will probably be noted only by the HN crowd and not really even noticed by everyone else. I would estimate the general public’s rate of choosing the ads on Google SERPs is something like 80-90% already.

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