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Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

Google's incentives are not aligned with their users.

They used to recognize that long term it's better to make the decision that the users would want even if it's worse short term. The company was founded on this principle when Larry and Sergey tried to sell pagerank to Overature search (iirc) - the Overature ceo at the time said good results were bad because users would leave the 'portal' page too soon and not see enough ads. That's partly what lead to them creating their own company. [0]

I'd guess Google is making an Overature like mistake today. I guess it could also be failure to operate on stuff like this at scale, which also isn't great.

[0]: I'm pretty sure I'm remembering this from Levy's In The Plex, but I read it years ago so not 100% sure this is accurate.

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Yeah google has by fiat down ranked entire classes of results and companies therein many many times... And yet Pinterest is exempt?

Rap Genius being the most prominent example.[0] It makes me wonder if Pinterest just has an enormous ad spend with Google and Google is unwilling to risk that.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/25/google-rap-genius/

Or it could be risk of monopoly-related lawsuits, right?

The best I can steelman is that they're sitting on data that shows users actually want the current behavior which is why it's there (which could be true? I don't know - I'm not the average user).

They'd have to disambiguate that from the obvious motivated reasoning that's likely to exist there too.

Even then, sometimes you know better than users when making long term bets about what you do, faster horses and all - it's part art and part science.

Average users are also not necessarily the best to optimize on. 99% of wikipedia users never write anything. Does that mean the users that write are relatively worthless?

Speaking of Wikipedia, nearly 100% of the time when I Google something medical related I want to get the Wikipedia page for it. Not WebMD or Mayo clinic or whatever. But Google never includes the Wikipedia link (at least on the first page of results), so I have to append “… wiki” to the search. I can only assume this is intentional.

Maybe one more reason to switch to DuckDuckGo with bang operators:

!w <search> to search Wikipedia directly.

I mean “wiki <search>“ works on Google too. But I don’t want to type anything extra. My problem here is if we assume the search engine should be good at predicting what I actually want to see for a given term, Google is failing at that.

Sounds like you need a BCI like this: https://shop.openbci.com/collections/frontpage

(semi-joking... but complaining about typing 3-5 letters is definitely a 1st world problem ;)

It absolutely is :) But so is complaining about Pinterest ruining photo search!

Fair enough! Then again the top-voted comment IMO invalidates the entire article's premise i.e. Bing image search works fine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29151512

That is to say that Google image search is the real problem and not Pinterest.

The late 1990s and early 2000s was a silly time because of the portals. I worked for a search engine company that delivered search to a well-known portal and I can remember how much we despised what they did with our technology.

Google was able to break out because they managed to retain great talent and was able to stay funded for a few critical years until their bets paid off. And they did so rather quickly.

I can't help but feel that we're back to a variant of the portal mindset. Only now it is more about B2B and spying on users. And it doesn't feel like Google does anything out of passion anymore. There's really no race to perfect technology - just to be good enough to stay ahead of competition.

The Google of old might have invested in image search to fulfil its potential. The Google of today probably sees it as waste of effort.

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