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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

I don't want an 'experience', I want a tool.

I say that as a Mac user with a ton of Apple stuff, so I appreciate that design is function, but every time a company tags a product with the word 'experience' it's a red flag.

Every way a company interfaces with customers is an experience. Is the standard Google Search not an experience? Do users of Google Docs not have an experience of it? The implication is that this time they considered design, as against with everything else. They might as well call it Search Generative Well Designed Thing. Presumably unlike the other stuff they do. Just make it all good. "This time we made it an experience". If you have to say that, it's implicitly assuming failure as the default. Just call it Google Generative Search, and make it actually good.

I know, sorry, too much of a rant.

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> Is the standard Google Search not an experience? Do users of Google Docs not have an experience of it?

I think perhaps you're getting caught up in the semantics. They are both experiences.

Referring to the Generative Search as an "experience" is only to differentiate it from the standard Google Search experience. It is really a synonym for "mode", but mode would sound too mechanical (like the modes of a Dremel tool) for something like search.

Mode also implies that that it's something you turn on and off, but this is a product that itself decides when to offer you generative results, vs something like ChatGPT or Bard which are always generative.

Eventually, it will likely merge back into the standard experience/mode.

When it hallucinates and makes a libellous statement that you then repeat to others—oh boy, you're gonna have such an experience.

UK libel laws are ridiculous

Are they? It's providing accountability. If people won't fact-check big and damaging statements then that's their problem. Ass-pulling falsehoods is what's wrong with a lot of what I read on HN.

They are. Friend of mine worked as a junior solicitor with the libel tourism firm in the UK. The jurisdiction was used as a court of convenience for everything from the Johnny Depp trial to Scientology suing Louis Theroux. Scientology were one of their largest clients, and worked with them to try prevent the release of books and documentaries in various territories, credibly threatening defamation suits. UK (and Irish) defamation laws don't exist to prevent falsehoods. They exist and are regularly used, to prevent embarrassment and financial damage to the most powerful people in society. There are a number of prominent public figures in the UK who would likely be in prison for sexual transgression, but for threats and intimidation of children and young adults from this and similar law firms. It's a monstrous situation.

IIRC UK libel laws are somewhat unusual in that you can win a case without actually proving that the allegedly libelous statements are false.

Agreed. Going on a vacation is an experience. Doing a Google search is not.

It still kind of is though. Most google-is-dead articles boil down to the fact that it is confusing and frustrating. That's at its core a bad (user) experience.

Approaching tools like search from an experience perspective is actually exactly what we need, because that's where it almost universally sucks.

I would prefer it if they made the actual search better.

Yeah that's sort of inseparable from improving the search experience.

A lot of the reasons why the search "is bad" is that it's hard to reason about their semantic search functionality. The inner workings of a hybrid keyword and semantic search is opaque, and as a consequence, it's hard to make the search engine retrieve what you want. That's a frustrating experience, and "bad search".

Likewise, if the search engine retrieves a bunch of annoying results that are basically blog spam on the topic you're investigating, then that's per definition annoying. If it retrieved less annoying results, the experience would improve, and the the search engine would be perceived as being better, i.e. the search experience would be better.

> it's hard to make the search engine retrieve what you want

I mean… they could start by blocking all the website that just copy paste wikipedia and stackoverflow and so on… Also the ones that copy paste & automatically translate.

Which would also improve the experience.

There are multiple definitions of the word "experience". "User experience" is another term we often use, without it ever being compared to "a vacation".

But when companies talk about making their thing "an experience", they aren't talking about UX in the way you mean.

It's a red flag because what it implies is that what they currently have isn't very good, but instead of fixing that they want to dress it up in fancy clothes.

> I don't want an 'experience', I want a tool.

> Every way a company interfaces with customers is an experience

Why can't it be both? As you pointed out, we also use "user experience" to denote "the overall experience of a person using a product". Standard search is one experience, this is another, other search engines provide another "experience". I don't just the use of the word being a "red flag". This is an utterly negative take.

I have no problem with it as a term of art, but to me using it in the name of a product is pretentious. Maybe it’s been poisoned for me by the fact Microsoft went through a phase when everything seemed to be marketed as an experience, and they were all absolutely terrible.

Furthermore they didn’t mesh well with other MS products they were used with that had different UI approaches. So part of the experience of using the ‘experience’ was that it clashed with other aspects of what was actually the same overall user experience. If you see what I mean.

>I know, sorry, too much of a rant.

Yep, these sorts of comments and threads degrade the HN experience quite a bit for me. You didn't actually say anything about the subject, or anything tangential but still interesting or relevant. You're just angry at words and that's not interesting at all.

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