HN Explorer

Ask HN: Why are Google's search products bad if Google has decades of Know-how?

27 points by mrkramer ↗ HN
I use Google's search products(Google Search, YouTube search etc.) on a daily basis and I see so many reasonable solutions that would significantly improve UX of Google Products but I don't understand that product designers and managers at Google are not seeing the same or similar solutions. Google has decades of know-how and unbounded human, financial and computational resources but still they can not figure out things like:

My backlog: Google Search: 1. Crawl, index and rank audio content of the web and add it next to Images and Videos in Google Search e.g. "All Images Videos Audio Maps Books More" so I can find and discover audio on Google.

2. Add tags in Google Search just like you added tags when searching in Google Images so I can find websites in specific category or in similar category or that I can find similar type of web content.

3. Just like GitHub has percentage of languages of source code within source code's project page e.g. C++ 90% C 10% add content type percentage next to each web page or website result in Search Results e.g. www.mybiologyblog.com Text 70% Images 20% Videos 10% Audio 0%

YouTube: 1. Standardize both web version and mobile version; in web version on channel's page I can search channel for videos on mobile I can not.

2. Add search option/bar in comment section of videos so I can search for information that is relevant and useful to me.

3. Add search option/bar to playlists so I can search for videos within my playlists.

4. Add Google Lens type search solution to YouTube so I can search "within" YouTube videos frame by frame; e.g. let's say I watch Wild Animals documentary and I want to skip to lions part, machine learning(AI) can analyse frame by frame and point me to that part of the video(Google has similar solution but only for creators called "Chapters"). And use speech recognition so I have transcript and timestamps for YouTube videos or in anther words try to transcribe and timestamp audio of YouTube videos. Frame by frame and transcription solution are complementary.

I have other ideas for YouTube and Google Search in particular but this is my short list. For Google Search my focus is linguistic analysis of websites and analyzing websites' content(text, images, videos, audio, links etc.) I would not try to guess what users want like Google does but I would like to mine and analyze the web and then present it in Search Results for users to discover. Users will find good search results if your analysis and presentation of websites and their specifics/qualities is good in Search Results page.

Also Google Chrome has some web search and web navigation problems that I would like to solve but that I can explain next time.

26 comments

[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 64.4 ms ] thread
sundbry
Because these days, Google search is just as much as about hiding some information as it is for finding other information. It's a product to maximize revenue and utility for its owners. It's hardly about maximizing utility for the end user.
dvngnt_
Define"bad" in my experience alternatives like ddg work until you want something obscure then Google shines
Bjartr
What Google are you using? I want to that one. For me, obscure is exactly where Google falls down these days, returning dozens of regurgitated listicle and low effort content marketing spam at best most of the time. Often ignoring extra words you've added to help narrow the result. Verbatim mode helps, but just barely these days.
Mountain_Skies
Google has an agenda but also SEO is an big industry that is at war with Google. Between Google's ideological bent and the war with SEO, it's not simply about indexing and ranking anymore.
sfifs
From what I can see and feel interacting with Google teams as a customer on the business side, (ie not as a consumer), it appears Product creation seems to be rewarded very well organizationally but Maintenance and continuous improvement, not so much.

Also it seems culturally very hard to be able to actually talk to their product engineers about their product - and it's not because of the sales teams are coming in the middle but because the sales teams themselves seem to struggle to get time from the product engineering teams. I've had multiple instances of sales teams suggesting that the best way forward was to talk with the product engineers, then struggling to setup time with them.

xg15
I thought the general process was to post on twitter/reddit/HN and wait until someone with "I work for Google but not on that product" disclaimer in their post reaches out to you...
jmcgough
Google search isn't optimized for usefulness - it's optimized for revenue.
doopy1
Because the products are optimized for making money.
fyzix
Search quality has decreased drastically within the last year... My theory is that they ran some A/B tests and concluded that:

bad search results = more clicks on ads

adrianmsmith
I agree, and that's why I think Google (the company) is a in a bad place. If they are under such pressure to increase revenue and the only way they can think of doing it is to damage their main product, then I guess there aren't many sources of revenue left.
axiosgunnar
This would be great news for competition.
xg15
I don't get it though. As other comments said, they are swimming in cash, to the point they can afford to be horribly inefficient. Where is that pressure coming from?
moralestapia
Because they switched to AI. That's why verbatim search, among other things, stopped working.
lifeformed
The absolute worst search results I've ever gotten are trying to search my history in Chrome.
emptybottle
For the same reasons why Boeings max8 was unsafe after decades of know-how — Shareholder value.
aristofun
Why isn’t a slaughterhouse comfortable for cows?

Google serves for ad buyers, they are the clients. Users are just a cattle being sold.

And it has been like this from the moment google started being a business.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
Decker87
I think there's more nuance than the cynical answer of making money.

Internally Google has become a "rest and vest" culture. Smart people ship one or two meaningful things per year, and because Google is swimming in cash they don't understand that they are ridiculously slow and inefficient.

peakaboo
Censorship and SEO.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
Anand_S
They must have optimized it for making more money rather than showing proper results
ranguna
Almost every comment here are saying different things, so probably a tldr of the comment section is: I don't like Google, so I'm just gonna wrap my anti-values around the products they offer and post it here as a comment.

In other words, no one really knows. If you don't like Google, I recommend just using something else.

is_true
A couple of years ago they added AI to search. It probably worked at the time, but in five years the amount of new content is really big and that's probably why things went wrong.
mleonhard
Making good products takes hard work and focus on users. Few people do this automatically. Most people only do it with sufficient incentive.

I worked at Google 2013-2018. The single root cause for Google and other tech companies letting quality degrade or failing to make good products is mis-aligned incentives. The company's leaders do not incentivize workers to prioritize user experience. The good news is that execution failures create opportunities for new companies to build innovative products.

mrkramer
>Making good products takes hard work and focus on users. Few people do this automatically. Most people only do it with sufficient incentive.

I know but how hard it would be for Google for example to crawl the web for audio content, index it and rank it. I can search for websites, images, videos etc. but not for audio? I could probably do it on a budget just like the guy from www.listennotes.com is doing it on a home budget for podcasts. Google has podcasts.google.com podcast search engine but audio is way broader than just podcasts.

Or how hard it would be for YouTube to add search to videos' comment section and to playlists. This seems so fundamental to YouTube and to company that says its mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

I never worked as a product designer but I assume I could approach to my manager and ask him or her to do it and pull this off in a few months time.

Also this what I mentioned in the original post doesn't make any sense for YouTube not to have:

>Standardize both web version and mobile version; in web version on channel's page I can search channel for videos on mobile I can not.

frogperson
"Good" is very subjective. Google has investors, customers and users to keep happy. It's most likely not possible to please all parties maximally. It's only natural that they optimize for profits, investors, and customers. The non-paying customers fall further down the priority list every year.