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Comment by A_D_E_P_T | Hacker News Reader

Pichai is simply a poor performer. Google's core businesses have gone markedly downhill just over the past few years:

- A regular Google search typically returns unrelated products for sale, 15 pages of corporate media and broken English SEO articles, and random videos.

- Reverse image search has been gimped, no longer performs as well as it used to, and even Yandex always returns better results.

- There have been a dozen threads here lately -- just over the past few months -- about Gmail's SPAM filters going haywire.

- AI is poised to eat Google's lunch, and there are rumors that they're lobbying Congress for AI research bans/restrictions, "because it's unsafe."

Honestly, with Pichai at the helm, they're going to go the way of DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory.

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> A regular Google search typically returns unrelated products for sale, 15 pages of corporate media and broken English SEO articles, and random videos.

I thought something happened to my browser session or something when it started giving useless results. Youtube is giving me nonsense after a certain set of results. I am shocked because search is THE tech of Google and wondered how they could screw this so badly. Sundar has caused the downfall of Google.

Google A/B tests their recommendations. Either these recommendations improve their topline metrics or you're in some exotic test group for some in-flight experiment.

Either way, these are deliberate choices whose results likely show that showing bad recommendations is good for business.

My guess is that worse first-page search results leads to more people clicking on the sponsored results, because at least they have some relevance to what they searched for.

However, I think the long-term result of this approach could be the loss of their seemingly insurmountable dominance of the search market.

> Reverse image search has been gimped, no longer performs as well as it used to, and even Yandex always returns better results.

I'm actually finding that aside from programming related queries or searching for reddit threads, Yandex is now the best general search engine, beating out Google, Bing, the bing derivatives like DuckDuckGo and Brave search, and I imagine Yahoo.

It's insane to me that the quality of search has slipped so low, and it also makes me wonder what it is about Yandex that allows it to avoid the modern hellscape of SEO optimized websites that spend 10,000 words saying nothing. It feels like it's got to be something to do with the fact that they have some large bias towards the age of a website.

  > the bing derivatives like DuckDuckGo and Brave search

Brave search is not a Bing derivative.

Independent index, but still dependent on Bing for some results.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/20/brave_search/:

> The company said in June that "for some features, like searching for images, Brave Search will fetch results from Microsoft Bing,"

https://search.brave.com/help/independence:

> Third-party providers

> Microsoft Bing is a third-party provider to Brave Search.

Right, I believe they state that 99% of their search results are from their own index, and then 1% supplement that with various other sources including Bing, Google, etc.

The poster I replied to said it was a Bing derivative which was not correct.

Brave results look pretty similar to bing for me, and pretty dissimilar to Google. I've been using it for a while since it's now the Brave default, and I just doesn't seem to break ranks from DDG/Bing whenever I bother to compare them.

> - A regular Google search typically returns unrelated products for sale, 15 pages of corporate media and broken English SEO articles, and random videos.

Not to mention malware redirect sites which Google, previously excellent at detecting, is seemingly clueless about and ranks them as high as Page 1 at times.

And there's that thing about losing access to one's Google account being irrevocable.

I know my password- Google admits it's correct. But I'm in the wrong geography now with a new phone, years later, and therefore can't login.

But Pichai is doing tremendous job. He had been hired to keep the lights on at Google for as long as possible and this is what he is doing.

You can mine Google for next 5-10 years but it is basically a dead end company. The goal is to give back as much as possible to shareholder so they an allocate capital to better performing ventures they choose. Google is irreparable and sinking.

YouTube is now full of garbage too.

Search is a joke. Whenever I want to search some conference videos on a topic I get trash after 2-3 results which is totally unrelated with "You may like" nonsense.

I, for one, appreciate all the video recommendations for local news stations in a country I don't live in.

I've had crypto scams in my recommendations everyday for more than a year now. It's like they just don't care anymore.

Correct. They don't care. I'm not sure if it is because of their culture or if it is a financial decision. Likely it is both.

My conclusion is based on my experience being a content consuner. A quick DuckDuckGo search will show you thousands upon thousands of horror stories that content creators have posted about YT doing them wrong.

I've been saying this for years. He simply doesn't have what it takes.

> A regular Google search typically returns unrelated products for sale, 15 pages of corporate media and broken English SEO articles, and random videos.

I just searched for HackerNews and have to scroll down to find HN because of ads.

I don't think you should blame Pichai for that. With or without him, Google was already going downhill. You can say he did not reverse course, but doing that means taking risks and I imagine investors of multi-billion dollar companies don't want CEOs to do that.

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