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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

There's a number of things that have happened in the organic search area of Google that seem to suggest a declining interest in quality organic results.

There's Matt Cutts' long leave of absence, his departure, and the announcement that he's not really being replaced. A much lower volume of communication from Google on initiatives in the space (they used to talk endlessly about Panda, Penguin, etc). Amit's original reason for departure was "his next journey will involve philanthropy"..that seems to have changed.

My guess is that two things are driving the declining interest...

a) The marketshare battle is done. Google won. No competition.

b) Their various initiatives to push organic results down the fold (more ads, knowledge graph, various widgets, and so forth) has made the quality of the organic results not as important. Good enough is the target.

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> There's a number of things that have happened in the organic search area of Google that seem to suggest a declining interest in quality organic results.

I think you may be falling for the SV cult of personality fallacy. There are still literally thousands of individuals you've never heard of working on organic search quality at Google who care very much about quality organic results. :)

No no no, the two person whose name he knew left after years in the same job, it must mean Google doesn't care anymore about their main product that makes roughly 90% of their revenue !

So yeah I totally agree, be it Google, Apple, Microsoft, ... A large amount of people around here are so used to small team startup represented by their founder that they always feel the need in similar stories to make a cult of personality for / against someone as if he was the product he worked for.

Well, to be fair the stuff that generates 90% of their revenue IS what's pushing organic results further down the page.

I mentioned more than just two personalities.

Edit: And, I did mention more focus on ads and widgets versus the actual organic results. If those weren't more important, why are they at the top, crowding organics down? The revenue isn't really coming from the organics themselves.

You would think so, but then Apple has thousands of engineers yet can't be bothered to regularly update its products, lazily copies parts and construction and even discontinued a bunch of stuff.

(And while Google keeps adding heuristics I wish some of those many developers and researchers would simply occasionally try the product and ban, purge the very obvious content farm and spam sites)

A much lower volume of communication from Google on initiatives in the space (they used to talk endlessly about Panda, Penguin, etc).

I hear that Google search has largely moved to machine learning techniques. When I was there in 2005-2009 there was a bunch of hand-tuned stuff, and hand-tuning was definitely Amit's preferred strategy at the time. One side effect might be that a machine learning black box has fewer big, externally-perceptible shifts. It also just might require less ongoing interesting engineering work. Hard to say, though.

Both Panda and Penguin were machine learning, and definitely had externally perceptible shifts. But, you're right, perhaps they've figured out how to do that with less disruption.

Edit: I wonder if Amit changed his tune regarding machine learning, at least for his new space.

There's some baseless speculation in this thread about what's Singhal's departure meant for Google search. It's important to remember that Singhal was committed Google's knowledge graph, a painstaking, manually constructed graph of entities and relationships that surfaces the occasional answer (ask Google what the capital of Azerbaijan is and you will see a knowledge graph answer). Knowledge graphs are brittle, hard to extend, and hard to modify in the face of changing data. Google has tilted towards machine learning and neural nets for a lot of functions, and Singhal was not part of that tilt. But you could argue that machine learning and neural nets are producing better results, which counters the argument that Singhal leaving means that Google doesn't care about organic results any more. That's BS, frankly.

The person who replaced Amit as head of search (John Giannandrea) is the founder / CEO of Metaweb and creator of Freebase -- aka what became Google's Knowledge Graph. Google using more ML in search doesn't mean a KG isn't also useful for query understanding.

And KGs aren't mutually exclusive with ML -- e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.04844

>Google doesn't care about organic results any more. That's BS, frankly.

Do they care less than they used to, though? Their placement on the screen as opposed to KG, widgets, and ads..and how that's progressed over time, seems to imply it.

Google seems to have largely solved its biggest problem: spammy results. It's very hard to find sites in the top results for strong keywords with poor backlink profiles.

It has done this by a) Actually improving its spammy backlink detection, and b) Scary webmasters away from spammy SEO tactics through sudden updates like Panda/Penguin and straight up propaganda.

Once you solve the spam issue, Google's search results organically become better. Ergo, it doesn't need to spend that much time monitoring and improving them

That's interesting, and would explain why no replacement was named for Matt.

I wonder how much they actually improved the webspam thing.

The search results you see today, versus years past, suggest a sort of "cheat" to do that...something like a seed set of trusted sites (big brands, universities, government sites, etc) , and weighting based on distance from those seeds.

I say that because I'll often get results that are heavy on authority, but low on relevance. What I'm looking for is on pages 2 and 3, on more niche, less prominent sites. It didn't used to be that way.

> Do they care less than they used to, though?

That's impossible to measure, but the arguments you have employed regarding personnel changes do not demonstrate your point.

Okay...the top two publicly visible leaders in the space leaving in the same timeframe could mean something. Perhaps in this case it does not. I don't think either of us knows for sure. It does, however, pique my interest in what the group direction is now.

What of the decision to not replace Matt with a specific role or person? Is that not interesting?

And, again, I mentioned many other observations, not just Amit and Matt.

Edit: If the primary driver was lack of expertise in the ML direction, Uber seems an odd place to land, doesn't it?

Another explanation for their leaving is that the overall strategy around Search is changing and now outside of those two individuals' realm of expertise.

I work for Google but this is pure speculation on my part.

> the top two publicly visible leaders in the space leaving in the same timeframe could mean something

Again, Amit may not have been aligned with the direction they're taking search. That doesn't mean Google doesn't care. In fact, it could mean just the opposite.

Singhal's title at Uber says that he is in charge of marketplaces and maps, not the self-driving stuff. So this would be stuff like pricing, dispatch, supply optimization, and route optimization which rely on traditional algorithms and not ML. But I agree with your larger point and find his departure from Google curious. Even if they were moving search in another direction or he was completely bored with what he was working on and wanted change, I am shocked that they would let someone of his caliber leave Google.

Supposedly, they leverage machine learning across those areas as well...perhaps not as the primary foundation, but used there nonetheless.

http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/02/uber-is-rolling-out-a-big-...

https://newsroom.uber.com/inferring-uber-rider-destinations/

There's other references, but you get the idea.

I'd add another item

c) "Search" is changing towards giving information rather than to websites.

Think Siri/Cortana/Alexa. Even Google tries to give you an answer rather than a website.

Also information is moving from "spread thin" websites to social graphs and more centralised locations

That was Amit's doing, actually. Around 2012, with the success of Knowledge Panels and the acquisition of Metaweb (FreeBase), he decreed that search would become a "conversational answer engine", devoted toward getting you the answer to your question as quickly as possible. The Hummingbird ranking update was part of that - it made it much more effective to phrase your query as a question rather than a bunch of keywords. Also renewed integration of Google Now into search, expanded Knowledge Panels, cards on mobile search, bigger investments in voice search, etc.

Which makes me wonder what search network ads look like in a hypothetical world in not so distant future if audio interfaces were primary search tool and output for the results.

Personally, at this point I'd rather pay Google a monthly subscription and get everything ad-free. That would align their interests with their users who would then be the customers vs the product and free up Google to do what is best for them in cases where ads may not make sense.

I wonder how many real search engine queries only need to return a Wikipedia page.

Indeed. Information concentrates, just like capital.

The career decisions of two people do not a policy make. Both people had been at Google for over 15 years and presumably wanted a change.

>The marketshare battle is done. Google won. No competition

Is there an analog to this? Is there another market where marketshare has "been decided"? My instinct tells me that companies who fall for this are in trouble.

As a Googler, I can tell you that no one I know here is under that impression. (Your instincts are absolutely correct.)

Desktop and server processors, and desktop operating systems.... Microsoft and Intel. Somewhat similar in that the platform itself is not growing as it once was, though still large...and that innovation has slowed.

Edit: Yes, mobile is hitting desktop, but that's the market itself changing...not the market share for desktop. Comparable in the search space is more people using Amazon directly for product searches versus starting with Google. Related markets and effects, but Amazon isn't a general search competitor.

Microsoft is rapidly losing the entire market of "Desktop" to Android and iOS apps. Intel has a serious competitor in ARM; most $bigcos haven't switched yet, but are definitely looking into it, as a way of applying pressure and keeping Intel's costs down.

If I had a nickel for every time I heard "market share war is over, X won" and then that marked X's high water point in the industry, I mean I'd be doing ok.

Guess this is the point where we short Alphabet?

My comment was a bit more nuanced than that. They appear to be shifting more effort into widgets and ads. And less into the actual organic results. It's not that odd the the lead runner slows down when they've lapped the field.

You are getting attacked for simply stating your opinion. Do we really want another echo chamber of opinions here?

Google might be still all in on search, but what's important here is the outside perception. They won the search war and desperately tried to recreate the success with other products. So far they haven't had another hit (some big misses, though).

> tried to recreate the success with other products. So far they haven't had another hit (some big misses, though)

If you're asking for non-ads products that have done pretty well -- Android, Youtube, Cloud doing pretty well.

Next possible moneymaker is Waymo.

>You are getting attacked for simply stating your opinion

The replies mostly seem to be saying that I'm equating just the two departures with a declining interest at Google in organic result quality. Of course, I mentioned more than that, but it's an easy way to dismiss me versus educating me on how I've got it wrong.

I've noticed the more nuanced of a statement I make on HN, the more likely I am to be attacked for it. It's getting worse as the site becomes more popular as well.

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