8 ms·

I don't know if Google needs a new CEO, but from everything I've heard about internal Google, they need to change up how they measure success and who they rewar

• A_D_E_P_T 4y ago
  Not only new products. At this point, they're doing a very poor job of maintaining their core, legacy products. Search, their bread and butter, has been going downhill for years -- and is practically unusable today. They've been slipping, bigtime.
  • svantana 4y ago
    > Search [...] is practically unusable today I keep seeing this sentiment around here, which confuses me because I think gsearch is better than ever. I find what I need instantly in 90% of cases, and when I don't, other engines don't really do better. Granted, I use ublock, but even with that turned off I'm not bothered by the ads. Can you provide examples of a query which gives unusable results, but Bing (or whatever) works?
    • adoxyz 4y ago
      From personal experience, Google search on a desktop w/ Adblock is great. And especially when you know what you're searching for, the experience is usually great. On mobile or without adblock though or when trying to do discovery of something new, you really have to sift through pretty much the first 5-7 results as they're all sponsored, ads, or terrible SEO spam. But it is a hard problem to solve, and no other search engine is better in that regard imo.
      • eptcyka 4y ago
        ublock won't help with SEO spam - it doesn't filter out native search results, just the ads. So it isn't really SEO spam, it's adword spam.
        • lb4r 4y ago
          It can filter out native search results as well, as long as you tell it what to filter out. It's of course a bit limited since you have to know beforehand what you don't want to see, but it works great if you're looking to, for example, filter out specific websites.
          • eptcyka 4y ago
            It can, but I don't know of any default filters that would do such a thing, and that is besides the point. It certainly doesn't have enough time to classify a particular entry as SEO spam without doing RPC to an external service, IMO.
        • martinald 4y ago
          This is a really good point and something I didn't quite think through. Problem is now you get ~6 ad links for many queries (given some ads have 'secondary links' in them). This now means even on a 4k monitor I only see 3 actual SEO results. It's much worse on mobile.
      • jmondi 4y ago
        I'm old enough to remember when the first 5-7 results were the ONLY ones you actually wanted to click on.
        • prepend 4y ago
          Same. I remember actually using “I’m feeling lucky” but now would only do that for some ironic chuckles.
    • jmondi 4y ago
      I don't think you will ever get a 1:1 answer of a query that "works" in DDG/Bing but not Google, search is too curated. From my experience, when I am searching for what seems like a rare - but not completely unheard of errors happening in my code, on my sprinkler system, anything, it seems like the Google results are just crap compared to what the same query 5 years ago would have yielded. I don't know what it is, if their algorithm is getting worse, or there is just too much shit on the internet to accurately index. From my experience, Google Search hasn't even just stagnated, it has gotten consistently and steadily worse for at least the last half decade. Same thing happened to my Google Home, literally got dumber as the days went on, queries that it could answer yesterday, would just stop working the next day. I threw that thing in the garbage.
    • andromeduck 4y ago
      I think the comkon case is if you're looking for anything niche/technical, it'll often just reinterpret your query as if it were a typo even if you quote it. That and searching for product reviews usually just returns SEO'ed trash like 10 10 lists or best vacuum cleaner 2020 that's just a mishmash of press releases as opposed to actul experience or useful information.
      • thayne 4y ago
        > That and searching for product reviews usually just returns SEO'ed trash I run into this for a lot of things beyond just product reviews, such as recipes or "what is X?" etc. Granted I don't think that is entirely Google's fault.
        • ghaff 4y ago
          In general, it's probably true that the amount (and sophistication) of spam and spammish content has tended to overwhelm whatever technology improvements in search there have been.
          • abakker 4y ago
            It's just that to the HN audience, the spam sure seems unsophisticated. I can imagine being able to filter out most blogspam just by looking at the CSS. like, every blog spam review and restaurant site is so obviously bad it hurts. also, "bestmitersaw.com" or other similar single product review/spam sites filled with affiliate links. Jeez. Kill them all.
      • ghaff 4y ago
        How many people and organizations online actually provide real filtered hands-on reviews of things these days? There are exceptions like Wirecutter and sites like Amazon provide some insight assuming you're willing to wade through all the fake reviews, But generally speaking, consumers aren't willing to pay the cost for in-depth reviews. ADDED: There are individuals in some domain niches but you pretty much need to know who they are.
    • Zanfa 4y ago
      Can’t say much about other search engines, but Google has definitely let it slip really bad. For example, organic results being pushed below the fold, with organic-looking paid results taking top spots instead. Another big issue they’ve had for about a year now is in my native language search, the organic results are completely been taken over by Google-translate generated content that actually redirects to random aliexpress items. Their language models seem to prefer Google-translated sites over human generated language for some reason.
    • johannes1234321 4y ago
      For many searches it is quite good. However once you look for very specific narrow results it attempts to outsmart you can be a real annoyance. When it decides to ignore some rare term and correcting your query while that rare term actually is the thing of highest significance. So yeah, for 95% of the searches it is great, but on the 5% it feels like modern advances are in the way.
      • JohnFen 4y ago
        If 95% of the Google searches I made were great, I wouldn't have stopped using Google. My experience is more like 10% of the Google searches result in something close to what I'm looking for before the third or fourth page.
    • dyno12345 4y ago
      I find that if I'm looking for a factual topic I just get heavily SEO'ed, heavily ad laden blogspam. The algorithm must be weighting dwell time because if you are looking for recipe for how to cook eggs you'll get articles with 7 pages of ads interspersed with fluff filler copy before any actual recipe. And they probably have no incentive to cut this down because much of those ads might go through google's own ad networks.
      • pclmulqdq 4y ago
        The recent yandex leak had dwell time in it, I think. It makes me sad that it means that recipes (a very competitive field) are going to be coming after novels on the top sites.
    • fidgewidge 4y ago
      [flagged]
    • burnte 4y ago
      I agree with you that saying it's unusable is ridiculous but I HAVE noticed a marked decline in results. I still get what I need 98% of the time, but now that 2% has gone from no results to having to figure out how to force Google to search for what I want. I'll search for a phrase and frequently it'll flat out ignore a word I entered, so I'll put it in quotes, and it STILL ignores it. Then I'll result to an entire phrase in quotes and I just get trash results. I feel like advanced search features have been nerfed for some reason.
    • kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
      Search for anything with a mercantile aspect and the first page of results will be all ads and e-commerce sites.
    • taeric 4y ago
      My suspicion is that most of the people that feel it is getting worse either a) hate ads or b) don't realize they do harder searches than what they used to do. I'm fully aligned on hating ads. It is silly how the top results are all sponsored. Curated, I would like. Sponsored? Not so much.
      • JohnFen 4y ago
        > don't realize they do harder searches than what they used to do. Perhaps, but that's still a good reason to stop using Google, because other search engines do better.
      • more_corn 4y ago
        My searches aren’t harder than they used to be. If anything they’re easier because I often know precisely what I’m looking for. I stopped using google because it ignores my search terms and I find that infuriating. I’ll use a lower quality search engine simply for the lack of annoyance. Whenever I open a new chrome profile I’m reminded that I objectively hate google search.
  • chillfox 4y ago
    I have been using a different search engine for about a year now and almost never go back to Google anymore, and when I do go back to Google it's almost always to use it as a dictionary (search: define something).
    • honkler 4y ago
      > I have been using a different search engine for about a year now Which one? > when I do go back to Google it's almost always to use it as a dictionary I've also found it great for dictionary + thesaurus + etymology. I wonder if there's something better so I can shed my reliance on google here.
      • crdrost 4y ago
        Wiktionary is pretty solid for etymology, but doesn't have quite the panache of etymonline. Dictionary/thesaurus, I don't know.
      • chillfox 4y ago
        you.com it allows you to customize it to some extend.
  • prepend 4y ago
    > Search, their bread and butter, has been going downhill for years As a user, yes. But based on the extra ads and garbage I suspect that profitability of search is at an all time high. So as long as search keeps “growing” then there’s an opinion that it’s a success. I think that’s dangerous for long term thinking and will lead to Google’s demise (see IBM, AT&T, Comcast, etc) that were profitable with horrible UX, until they weren’t profitable.
    • wbl 4y ago
      AT&T didn't get outcompeted. They got broken up by the government and before that were forbidden from commercializing discoveries some of which weren't really commercializable (like the origins of the universe).
      • JohnFen 4y ago
        And Comcast is still around and kicking its customers senseless.
  • hintymad 4y ago
    > they're doing a very poor job of maintaining their core, legacy products. My guess is that great PMs and engineers are not into incremental changes or maintaining a mature system. As a result, the sharpest minds for building product would have left the search org over the years, therefore the quality of search deteriorates over time. I'm not saying search org does not have great talent, but I guess their talent is about rearchitecting search infra for the 101 times for no groundbreaking gain.
    • alephnerd 4y ago
      A lot of the allstar PMs and Engs who helped actually GTM a lot of great Google products like Maps, Docs, Ads, etc left in the 2010s to start their own startups (eg. Jens Rasmussen - founded Google Maps and then left to found Where2), become execs at other companies (eg. Niklesh Arora @ PANW, Lars Rasmussen @ FB, Bret Taylor @ FB+Salesforce), become VCs (eg. Bret Taylor, Niklesh Arora), or (re)enter Academia (eg. John DeNero @ Cal). There also was a change in how PMs began getting hired at Google in the 2010s when they brought a senior ex-McK TMT consultant to lead and revamp the Product team after Marissa Mayer left to become CEO of Yahoo.
    • ertian 4y ago
      This is part of it. It's also well understood within Google that the way to get promo and move up (and secure your job...lack of 'upward momentum' means you'll be first on the chopping block) is to launch. Getting 'stuck' doing maintenance and incremental improvements is a death knell for your career. Thus the pattern of big flashy product launch, followed by stagnation and eventual cancellation.
    • pasttense01 4y ago
      Instead, my guess is that they are optimizing the system for maximum ad revenue--and that the products only have to be good enough so users won't switch to Bing, etc.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • conradfr 4y ago
    Even Android. For example the audio stack has more bug today on my Pixel 7 on Android 13 than back then on Android 8. Ffs, a Google phone with a Google OS and Google earbuds, the audio sometimes cut briefly when I unlock it. In the meantime audio professionals make music with iPhones.
• shemnon42 4y ago
  Your describing the outcomes of the old "perf" performance review system. Cultural issues like that are hard, but not impossible, to change. GRAD changes things, but as long as promotions are tied to shipping new projects and not excellence in maintaining those launches we will continue to see this behavior.
  • kqr2 4y ago
    How does GRAD change things for the better?
    • crdrost 4y ago
      GRAD in theory represents a huge improvement on Perf. Rather than having to please a faceless committee by stopping the whole company for several weeks per quarter to write performance data for the committee, you now have to please your manager and it's their job to gather that data. The layer of indirection between you and the calibration committee in Perf meant that maintenance work, since it does not generate nearly so many “artifacts” (design docs, engaged user statistics, lines of code written, code review requests) it was nearly impossible to quantify and reward. Your best chance was to ask people on neighboring teams to give you Kudos or Peer Bonuses for it, so that the committee would say “well it must have been important they got all of these gold stars!” This is how you get a dozen competing chat apps, “improved the last chat app” cannot appear easily on Perf, “wrote a new chat app and we already have 50 users!” can. However, though it affords an opportunity for things to be better, the internal rollout of GRAD has also been botched this past year. In the absence of strong leadership, managers are assembling the same data as before “we just must not call them perf packets”, and potentially reinstituting the same biases as before. (I was actually told by my manager that I could not get a rating above a certain ratings ceiling even though he wanted to recommend me higher because his director phrased a general rule that would apply to me, “if X then they should not get a rating above Y,” but hi I am also X on something of a technicality—and my manager was not sure he would have the political capital to argue my case.) The botched rollout means that these culture improvements from not having to prioritize only what can be easily quantified, are delayed. Like, seriously delayed. Imagine that with really strong solid leadership you could have changed the culture in one year, but now that people are reconstructing the broken familiar process inside of the new process, the culture is not going to change for the next 5 to maybe even 10 years as second order influences slowly nudge it into a better scenario.
• voytec 4y ago
  Some projects were launched to suffocate solutions blocking Google's revenue. Google Reader depopularizing RSS is one example.
• echelon 4y ago
  Pichai needs to go, and I've been calling it here for over three years. It's been so obvious Pichai isn't the one to lead Google. Here's a mountain of evidence where you can see him failing to adapt to a risky situation and changing market: 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25549445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25549445 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27588571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27588571 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21819608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21819608 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25986216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25986216 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34484142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34484142 Pichai has a history of not being bold, not responding to threats, not innovating, not fixing broken culture, not seeing the 20 year view of the market. He's lost some of the biggest advantages Google once held. He needs to be done. And he needs to be done three years ago. Now when he's tasked with reversing the sinking ship? Totally fumbling. Show him out and get a Nadella.
  • ProAm 4y ago
    Google has entered it's IBM age.
    • GenerocUsername 4y ago
      As if Google has half the staying power of IBM. You have to eeek along for 50 years to be IBM. Google has 1 cash cow and if it does it will be more Nokia than IBM
      • sebastiansm 4y ago
        Nokia has more years than IBM?
      • hackitup7 4y ago
        Seriously... IBM, even in its completely decrepit and uncompetitive state, still kicks off $1-3 billion in free cash flow per quarter.
  • langitbiru 4y ago
• tlogan 4y ago
  Google leardship was primarily reacting to threats, such as Amazon S3 and the iPhone, rather than proactively innovating. Despite the fact that AI is widely regarded as the future, Google has not made a significant effort to dominate in this field. I think Google needs a visionary leader who can anticipate the future and make strategic investments. I do not think internal structure will change without visionary leader.
  • skissane 4y ago
    > Despite the fact that AI is widely regarded as the future, Google has not made a significant effort to dominate in this field. I think of “Google and AI”, and I remember hearing more about their work on “AI ethics” than work on actual “AI” itself. Of course, ethics is important, but if you are more focused on the ethics of doing something than actually doing it, that’s scarcely a recipe for leading the market-on the contrary, it sounds rather risk-averse-and, maybe that’s unfair, I don’t know, but that’s just the impression I get from my own limited perspective.
    • hallqv 4y ago
      [flagged]
      • hef19898 4y ago
        What has "wokeness" to do with any of that?
    • FormerBandmate 4y ago
      AI ethics is also big at OpenAI tbf. OpenAI actually releases major models to the public, Google looks like the IBM to their Microsoft right now. Google has created things like TensorFlow tho, OpenAI is flashy but only time will tell if that leads to real, monetizable results
      • amf12 4y ago
        > Google looks like the IBM to their Microsoft right now. I really dislike how Microsoft is being considered to "be better at AI" recently. No, they just integrated another AI solution in Bing. They haven't released any big AI product themselves for a long time.
• hintymad 4y ago
  > they need to change up how they measure success and who they reward This is culture, and culture is one of the most important responsibilities of a CEO.
• jqpabc123 4y ago
  Everything Google does is built around advertising and privacy invasion. They really need to shift their focus a little --- from personalized to more context sensitive ads. But they really can't do this because they lack the context to base ads on. Amazon has the context by virtue of being the retail/ecommerce outlet on the internet. And their ad business continues to grow.