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On the topic of not having enough work to do, here's a couple questions to any Google employees: 1. As someone generally frustrated with the quality of the sea

On the topic of not having enough work to do, here's a couple questions to any Google employees: 1. As someone generally frustrated with the quality of the search results I get on Google, is improving search quality seen as any kind of priority within the company? To be fair I can't think of any other search engine that returns better results. But I feel like Google's gotten very complacent with their search, which is not surprising given the fact that it's practically a monopoly. 2. Is there any initiative to rewrite gmail on the web? The damn thing takes like 30 seconds to load. For a company pioneering progressive web apps and web performance, it boggles my mind that they've put no effort into improving gmail's atrocious load times over the last decade.

VHRanger 6y ago
I imagine the finishing in quality is due partly to choosing a more aggressive trade-off on monetization, and partly on typical "large scale enterprise" inefficiencies
nikofeyn 6y ago
gmail was just recently rewritten. it was the rewrite that made it so slow. and i say rewrite from the perspective of the user. i have no idea what they did. it was just that there was a version that, while quite old in design and lack of features, wasn't disfunctional. then it changed and is now so slow to be disfunctional.
dooglius 6y ago
You can use the "basic HTML" version that's much better
deegles 6y ago
The cynical view about search quality is that the metric being optimized for is not how satisfied people are with the results, but the amount of ads and therefore revenue earned. Search results only need to be good enough to get you to come back and not worse than the competition. I wish Google had a subscription option (with actual support) that eliminated all ads across their products. Imagine Amazon's customer obsession with Google tech... I'm sure it would do well for the 4 years they would support it.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  Google Contributor was their ad-free subscription option. It was always a curious product, never really seemed to have management buy-in, and was pretty much a one-man product, which a 'subscription to get rid of ads across the whole web' shouldn't have been.
- jl2718 6y ago
  Controversial for google.com, unquestionable for YouTube.
ashtonkem 6y ago
On 2: any initiative to rewrite Gmail will get shut down or reworked again without notice. See, Google Inbox. Highly recommend giving up on Gmail as an interface, and treat it as an IMAP/SMTP server only.
mywittyname 6y ago
2. They released Inbox, which was amazing and had a cult following. Then they killed Inbox. Presumably because they could not figure out how to capitalize on an extraordinarily useful, fast paradigm-shifting email client.
- mav3rick 6y ago
  Just the insight we were longing for. How about very few users define "cult following" for you ?
downerending 6y ago
My list: 1. How about an option to Maps to stop suggesting unprotected left turns at busy intersections? 2. Also, a Maps option to stop routing me through residential neighborhoods to save ten seconds. 3. Find existing, dormant Google accounts that obviously belong to the same human as another active Google account, and offer to restore access.
jlebar 6y ago
I left Google a few months ago, but I can speak to (1). I never worked on search directly, and of course I'm speaking only for myself. > 1. As someone generally frustrated with the quality of the search results I get on Google, is improving search quality seen as any kind of priority within the company? Search quality is kind of Google's secret sauce, so it doesn't get talked about a lot. But here's one public example of a huge engineering task that ultimately led to improved search results: https://www.blog.google/products/search/search-language-understanding-bert/ https://www.blog.google/products/search/search-language-unde... Using BERT in search is about much more than plugging an algorithm into the query pipeline. Google is one of the main contributors to the field of deep learning, and developed BERT. And Google also designed and built an entirely new chip (TPUs) to run this model in production. I believe that you're not seeing improvements. And changing things without breaking other people is always hard, but particularly hard on software that billions of people use many times a day like Google search. That slows things down for sure. Honestly I was amazed they managed to roll out BERT on TPUs for search despite those obstacles. That should show a little bit of how committed they are to improving things.

VHRanger 6y ago

I imagine the finishing in quality is due partly to choosing a more aggressive trade-off on monetization, and partly on typical "large scale enterprise" inefficiencies

nikofeyn 6y ago

gmail was just recently rewritten. it was the rewrite that made it so slow. and i say rewrite from the perspective of the user. i have no idea what they did. it was just that there was a version that, while quite old in design and lack of features, wasn't disfunctional. then it changed and is now so slow to be disfunctional.

dooglius 6y ago

You can use the "basic HTML" version that's much better

deegles 6y ago

The cynical view about search quality is that the metric being optimized for is not how satisfied people are with the results, but the amount of ads and therefore revenue earned. Search results only need to be good enough to get you to come back and not worse than the competition. I wish Google had a subscription option (with actual support) that eliminated all ads across their products. Imagine Amazon's customer obsession with Google tech... I'm sure it would do well for the 4 years they would support it.

londons_explore 6y ago
Google Contributor was their ad-free subscription option. It was always a curious product, never really seemed to have management buy-in, and was pretty much a one-man product, which a 'subscription to get rid of ads across the whole web' shouldn't have been.
jl2718 6y ago
Controversial for google.com, unquestionable for YouTube.

ashtonkem 6y ago

On 2: any initiative to rewrite Gmail will get shut down or reworked again without notice. See, Google Inbox. Highly recommend giving up on Gmail as an interface, and treat it as an IMAP/SMTP server only.

mywittyname 6y ago

2. They released Inbox, which was amazing and had a cult following. Then they killed Inbox. Presumably because they could not figure out how to capitalize on an extraordinarily useful, fast paradigm-shifting email client.

mav3rick 6y ago
Just the insight we were longing for. How about very few users define "cult following" for you ?

downerending 6y ago

My list: 1. How about an option to Maps to stop suggesting unprotected left turns at busy intersections? 2. Also, a Maps option to stop routing me through residential neighborhoods to save ten seconds. 3. Find existing, dormant Google accounts that obviously belong to the same human as another active Google account, and offer to restore access.

jlebar 6y ago

I left Google a few months ago, but I can speak to (1). I never worked on search directly, and of course I'm speaking only for myself. > 1. As someone generally frustrated with the quality of the search results I get on Google, is improving search quality seen as any kind of priority within the company? Search quality is kind of Google's secret sauce, so it doesn't get talked about a lot. But here's one public example of a huge engineering task that ultimately led to improved search results: https://www.blog.google/products/search/search-language-understanding-bert/ https://www.blog.google/products/search/search-language-unde... Using BERT in search is about much more than plugging an algorithm into the query pipeline. Google is one of the main contributors to the field of deep learning, and developed BERT. And Google also designed and built an entirely new chip (TPUs) to run this model in production. I believe that you're not seeing improvements. And changing things without breaking other people is always hard, but particularly hard on software that billions of people use many times a day like Google search. That slows things down for sure. Honestly I was amazed they managed to roll out BERT on TPUs for search despite those obstacles. That should show a little bit of how committed they are to improving things.