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

59 points by HEGalloway 1 year ago | 56 comments

I've been increasingly getting annoyed at Google search results. I understand this is an old topic and quite a hot one. Many people feel the same about this. But I can't seem to wrap my head around why isn't Google doing anything. They did push an update a couple of months ago, but it didn't seem to make a dent. Results are still absolute crap, full off SEO junk.

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.

Let's be honest, google is not a search company. They're an ad company and their current goal is not to organize the world's information but to pick the best ad for the user. Ads are bad we all know that, I get it but they also pay the bills and we can't live in an ideal world. So ads are fine, I'm not mad at ads. Heck, if ads are relevant to me I'm cool with it.

In my opinion, search results and ads are not mutually exclusive, they can't and shouldn't live without each other. Both need the other to survive. But I think the management at Google has forgotten that. They're trying to optimize for ad revenue, they think it's working. And it is, companies pay tons to rank their content. But I think it'll all crash and burn eventually as they realize their stuff isn't shown in the SERPs because people now append "Reddit". Or maybe I'm just completely flat-out wrong but I can be sure about one thing - their results are going to get worse if they don't switch to a user/product-focused mindset.

Also, the CEO sucks. He's not a tinkerer, he's a bureaucrat. He's like a shitty caretaker that doesn't care about the users or the product.

Sorry for the rant, I'm just concerned.

dageshi 1 year ago |

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.

xk_id 1 year ago | |

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?

layer8 1 year ago | |

> 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.

If LLMs need the publication of useful writing to compete with it, then they won’t be competitive without it. In other words, there is always incentive to publish writings that aren’t something you would otherwise be able to get from an LLM.

In addition, LLMs don’t necessarily pick up on a single publication. Their training is more shaped by patterns and concepts espoused by a large multitude of publications. This also incentivizes the publication of novel original thoughts.

The web isn’t dead at all. The web — HN being a great example — is also an entirely different way of content discovery than prompting an LLM.

apsurd 1 year ago | | |

How do people find these novel publications?

Seems it's the age of social, 1:1 subscriptions like substack, patreon -- creator economy.

That's fine, but in this ecosystem, there's no need to publish things publicly, right?

Public publishing is for search discoverability. If the end game for search is instant answers, then both the engines and the content creators dont benefit one another. To your point of it only mattering in the aggregate training sense.

So public content discovery by index is dead.

dageshi 1 year ago | | |

Those outputting the article from the LLM can concentrate on SEO including backlinks from other LLM generated articles. The question becomes does an average LLM article + the best possible SEO beat the original article?

I'm gonna say, yes, it does at which point there's no incentive for the original author. That's of course assuming the user actually searched at all or went to the LLM directly instead in which case the original author of the article has no chance at all.

thomassmith65 1 year ago |

  >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.

readthenotes1 1 year ago | |

Of any time...

thomassmith65 1 year ago | | |

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.

majewsky 1 year ago | | |

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.

minimaxir 1 year ago |

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.

xp84 1 year ago | |

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.

danielovichdk 1 year ago |

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.

fuzztester 1 year ago | |

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

fuzztester 1 year ago | | |

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

bediger4000 1 year ago | |

Do they really know search is over (and what are the consequences of that!?!) or are they just doing the accountant/finance major thing of looking at profit and loss and "cost centers", then maximizing the profit?

I bet it's the latter.

fuzztester 1 year ago | | |

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

zzleeper 1 year ago |

> 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?)

yablak 1 year ago | |

I use Kagi also, but the reason that it's at least as good as Google is that they use the Google search API as a major source of search results.

Ferret7446 1 year ago | |

Pichai's strategic vision is, and was, AI, and that proved to be right, or at least, not clearly wrong yet. The only failing was that it was ChatGPT and not Google that made the crucial LLM breakthrough and won first mover advantage.

If anything, his failing is maintaining the right corporate culture (and not his vision).

zx8080 1 year ago | | |

> failing is maintaining the right corporate culture

Would you please share some good links to read about it?

xivzgrev 1 year ago |

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.

smokel 1 year ago | |

I think this is a bit of an oversimplification that does not help to understand the problem at hand.

What exactly is "the product" here? Google is constantly innovating and its search engine is in no way comparable to the one from 1997. Google Maps, Gmail, YouTube, all have their place in the vast portfolio that circles around ads and search.

huksley 1 year ago |

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.

lobito14 1 year ago |

Their business is manipulation, spying, control and deception, things money cannot buy.

tim333 1 year ago |

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?

leoc 1 year ago |

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.

Barrin92 1 year ago |

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.

apsurd 1 year ago |

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.

II2II 1 year ago | |

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.

renegat0x0 1 year ago |

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.

FrankWilhoit 1 year ago |

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

tennisflyi 1 year ago | |

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?

FrankWilhoit 1 year ago | | |

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?

dustingetz 1 year ago |

kagi.com

hagbard_c 1 year ago | |

One thing to rule them all, one thing to find them, One thing to bring them all, and in the sandbox bind them:

SearxNG [1]

[1] https://github.com/searxng/searxng

dotcoma 1 year ago | |

Also: DDG, Qwant, Mojeek and Brave Search.

dzhiurgis 1 year ago | | |

Been using ddg for over a year. It shimming all the news sites with MSN (a bit like Google's AMP without the benefits) is a bit yuck. Also Google Shopping is sometimes useful. Otherwise I haven't looked back.

arandomusername 1 year ago | |

This, super happy with it. Search engine that doesn't rely on ad revenue.

hackerbeat 1 year ago | |

Also, Bing serves much better results than Google these days. No joke.

dzhiurgis 1 year ago | | |

I had a quick look and even yahoo is more useable than google nowadays. How tables turned.

imp0cat 1 year ago |

It could be worse.

What if they know that the results aren't as great as they used to be, but can't do much about it, getting overwhelmed by AI blogspam stuff?

refulgentis 1 year ago |

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.

withinboredom 1 year ago |

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.

seoulmetro 1 year ago |

Yes...

They built it that way. Their goal is to earn money and sell ads, not to make their products better.

barbarr 1 year ago |

I'm absolutely sure Sundar browses this site. Hope he sees this.

ricopags 1 year ago | |

Certain based on anything other than instinctive surmise?

whateverevetahw 1 year ago | |

Exactly what I was thinking. If he didn't know before, he definitely knows now.

lobito14 1 year ago |

Their business is manipulation, spying, control and deception, things money cannot buy.

delduca 1 year ago |

Just use Kagi.

rwaksmunski 1 year ago |

I think Google search quality peaked around 2012, it's been downhill since then. Enshittification is real.

antod 1 year ago | |

I think the web had peaked by 2012. I'm now wondering whether Chrome overtaking Firefox might be related.

>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.