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> Moonshots maybe should come once you've mastered all your core products? Then they'll never come.
by Normal_gaussian 10y ago
> Moonshots maybe should come once you've mastered all your core products?
Then they'll never come.
- jahnu 10y agoThey mastered search. They mastered mapping.
- slmyers 10y agoIs anything truly "mastered"?
- iopq 10y agoIt's not "perfect", it's just "mastered"
- lorenzhs 10y agoJust yesterday I got a blank result page for a sensible query, seems to have hit some rarely visited bucket combined with a busy machine somewhere or the like, and the background request timed out. Of course a refresh fixed it, but software is never perfect.
- redthrowaway 10y agoSearch has stagnated. Google has gotten scarily good at anticipating what I want to know, but conspicuously bad at answering hard questions. There's tons of room for improvement. Similarly, Google Maps has added features that make it a better map, and it's a great place to find what time a store closes and what their phone number is. But it's been essentially the same service, with iterative improvements, for years. There's a world of possible uses for that data beyond what we imagine when we think of a map.
- _pmf_ 10y ago> Google has gotten scarily good at anticipating what I want to know, but conspicuously bad at answering hard questions. Well, 98 percent of the market is not asking hard questions, so by dropping support, they are actually making their search product more tailored towards their market.
- sievebrain 10y agoI suspect Google Search has not actually had quality regressions, but rather that your expectations have gone up over time without you realising it.
- matwood 10y agoThis. It used to be the first page of results was good enough. Now if it is not in the top 3-4, I refine my query.
- redthrowaway 10y agoYes, I might have phrased that poorly. Google Search still finds relevant web pages just as well as it did 5 years ago, perhaps better. It certainly has leveraged the data it collects on me to suggest search terms in a way that's almost eerie. But it's still a tool to find relevant pages, not a tool to find answers. It's made some progress with the semantic web and knowledge graph, but that still provides basic facts about people, places, and things. At its core, it's still a portal. It's still just a much better version of Excite. Search today feels like it did in 1997: a "solved problem" ripe for disruption. Google has the talent, technology, and data to produce something an order of magnitude better.