4 ms·
> The New York Times dubbed Pandu Nayak, a Google vice president of search, "the face" of Google's defense, which is that it's not Google's access to more data
by dpe82 3y ago
> The New York Times dubbed Pandu Nayak, a Google vice president of search, "the face" of Google's defense, which is that it's not Google's access to more data that keeps Google leagues ahead of competitors in search, it's "brilliant people, working tirelessly to improve its products."
The notion that data isn't absolutely critical is a bold-faced lie and Pandu knows it. The usefulness of any proposed change to the search algorithm cannot be decided without sufficient user traffic to run an experiment. Every single change - even very minor tweaks - goes through user experiments on live traffic. The more traffic you have, the more experiments you can run concurrently and the quicker they converge on statistically significant results. The smartest engineers in the world cannot replace the value of live, experimentable user traffic.
Pandu knows this because he's the one ultimately responsible for the weights of the various metrics used to decide which experiments are launchable, and for enforcing that policies and the culture around running those experiments are in-place and followed.
- ocdtrekkie 3y agoI mean their defense is ridiculous on its face. "It's our smart enployees" half of which either now work at those competitors or were poached from those competitors. And if we talk about Google's extreme institutional incompetence across its entire portfolio... Fifteen years ago the claim Google employees are uniquely smart might've held to even minimal scrutiny but not today.
- dpe82 3y agoGoogle absolutely does have some very smart employees, and their research org does amazing work. But as they've grown headcount they've certainly regressed toward the mean.
- ocdtrekkie 3y agoSure, Google has some very smart employees, but so does Microsoft, who "can't compete". The reason why is the defaults and the data volume. What Google wants you to believe in this claim is that Google employees are smarter than their competitors' employees, and that is absurd.
- elicash 3y agoI disagree. If I could only have one: Google's engineers, or their deal with Apple, I'd take the former. This is an easy choice for me, too. I think you are mischaracterizing their argument if you are suggesting that Google is saying lots of queries makes nearly no impact. They would have that regardless of their deal with Apple.
- dpe82 3y agoHaving been a Google engineer who bootstrapped a new recommendation system with the advantage of existing data and distribution... I'd take the latter any day. :) It comes down to: engineer A says we should do X to make the system better; engineer B says we should do Y. How do you decide? You run an experiment against some known important metric. Do that hundreds or thousands of time a year and you eventually end up with a pretty decent system. By buying up Apple's traffic they made it much harder for a potential competitor to form by removing one of the most important tools: enough traffic to run experiments.
- elicash 3y agoI think you're selling yourself and the value of your skills too short! But more importantly, I hope you see the question isn't whether huge volume matters. It's whether it's nearly the only thing that matters. The quote you cited is quite innocuous, an exec saying they have "brilliant people, working tirelessly to improve its products." Twisting that quote to suggest they are a liar seems really unfair. I'd also say leadership matters, not just engineers. Microsoft says their shareholders would have struggled to accept the high price tag of a deal with Apple. That's their fault? Either that, or they don't believe their own argument here.
- dbtc 3y agoYeah, how are you going to get all that valuable data without some good engineers? I guess the real money maker is the hiring department.