Hacker News Reader

Comment by joebadmo | Hacker News Reader

You can wave your hands around in pretty patterns all you want – the fact remains I'm a user who used to enjoy the product and now is frustrated by it. I'm not alone in this. Have they annoyed enough users for it to be a big problem? We'll see. But big or not – it's a problem.

I'm not sure what you mean by "wave your hands around in pretty patterns." I'm not denying that these things annoy some or even many users. I'm saying Google's pretty obviously in the best position to be able to tell, and famously and religiously acts from that position to a fault.

We seem to agree that Google can't do nothing. I guess my perspective on it is that Google's willingness to change even its core source of revenue continues to draw admiration from me.

View on HN

I think we disagree on Google's legendary omniscience. Minimizing the years-long frustration I, and many I've talked to, have experienced because Google knows best is a hollow argument to me.

The quality of their product degraded and they just kinda... did nothing about it for awhile. It got so bad it had to turn into a press thing before they did something about it. The press is damn lazy, so for my money, that means something.

As to the rest – I share you admiration for that kind of gumption. Money can so easily blind and poison progress. So the strategy to continue evolving is sound! The tactics, though, are dubious.

I'd say that any changes to search need to be made with relevance, convenience and user satisfaction as inviolable factors. Anything else is playing with fire in a library, if you're Google.

Or maybe not. We'll see.

I just really want my 2007-era Google search back.

That seems like a perfectly reasonable point to collegially disagree on. I can't say that I have any special insight into what goes on inside Google, but contrary to your experience, I feel my search experience has generally gotten better. I doubt that Google at any point "did nothing" about search quality, but again, I have no special insight there. I do think that Google frantically doing something in opposition to a hostile SEOsphere can look like nothing, while in fact being a whole lot.

I do agree that the tactics are often dubious. I certainly don't always agree with them. But I can simultaneously understand the motivations behind them. I would have loved to see more grand, open initiatives like Wave, even as it failed spectacularly, but I can understand the trepidation.

You can't go back. 2007-era Google would be unusable with all the SEO-hacks that people have discovered since then. Google has to keep tuning their algorithms to stay ahead of the "optimizers" and spammers.

I'm sensible of the challenges Google faces algorithmically. I was speaking solely of user experience – how the product interprets my input.

Google's pretty obviously in the best position to be able to tell, and famously and religiously acts from that position to a fault.

You said it. I'm reminded of a line from Stephenson's Snow Crash:

Hiro runs down the center of the Towne Hall... He turns off all the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it's happening to him. Very post-modern.

Google's big mistakes will be the best documented mistakes in human history, especially in retrospect when historians have sufficient time to sort the data from the chaff. But that doesn't mean the mistakes won't happen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com