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Comment by jstummbillig | Hacker News Reader

Considering how much Google search has shaped my life, I am somewhat* surprised by the amount of people in this thread, who apparently have zero tolerance for continued innovation in this area and the rough edges it brings.

*Oh well, it's hn, after all

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This phrasing is pretty biased and something I most often see from product managers who are pushing changes that aren't in most user's interests. Many product changes that Google makes these days are driven by promotions and/or increasing revenue, not to make products better for end users. You can refer to all changes as "innovation", but it's going to sound unreasonable to most.

Also, characterizing people who object to one specific change as having "zero tolerance for continued innovation" is ridiculous and innacurate.

> something I most often see from product managers

I am not a product manager. A data point, to help adjust your bias.

> Many product changes that Google makes these days are driven by promotions and/or increasing revenue, not to make products better for end users

Can you be specific? In this particular instance, how does AI integration increase revenue? Again, I don't know what "promotions" refers to here. Feel free to be specific, if you do.

> You can refer to all changes as "innovation", but it's going to sound unreasonable to most.

I agree, that does sound fairly unreasonable.

> Also, characterizing people who object to one specific change as having "zero tolerance for continued innovation" is ridiculous and innacurate.

Again, we are in agreement: That would be ridiculous. And so is thinking of ways to integrate AI into Googles main product as "one specific change".

It's kind of interesting when you look back a year or so to when ChatGPT came out, and the prevailing HN sentiment seemed to be that ChatGPT would be a Google Search killer, even back when it was even more prone to hallucinations and stating wild nonsense as fact.

Guess that was before the doomers had things to point fingers at.

When ChatGPT first came out, you were getting everyone's first impressions, which LLMs are notoriously good at. And if you ask me, mostly useless once you get past those first impressions.

I'm not convinced a lot of it is for the better... I literally have to scroll down at least a screen and a half for the actual search results on my phone more often than not. And AI result makes that even worse.

I have a low tolerance for tools that don't work well.

I'm not willing to put up with rough edges for "continued innovation" in a mainline product, and I don't see why I should have to.

Release the rough product as a beta for those who like the bleeding edge. Sand those edges down before mainstreaming it. The eagerness of software companies to release junk in the mainstream as a kind of "free" beta testing or market research is a large part of why software quality is not so good these days.

I wouldn't call this innovation. It's half-baked (quarter-baked?) bad software that has nothing to do in a production system.

As a counterpoint to what’s happening in the thread; I’ve found this new feature quite useful.

It saves me a lot of time when searching trivial things.

You’re projecting your own life experience into other people instead of empathising with different experiences and trying to understand where they come from.

People don’t “have zero tolerance for continued innovation”¹, they’re tired of companies shoving shit down our throats and hailing deficient technology as the second coming of Christ. Sundar Pichai called this “more profound than fire and electricity”, for crying out loud. If they presented the technology with humility and honesty instead of throwing sand in our eyes and trying to hide the rough edges with a “trust me, bro”, you’d see them being given more slack.

¹ That’s the type of leading statement that prevents one from understanding another’s point of view. It makes a pre-judgement of something as being unambiguously good.

The worst is when actual innovation get thrown out (by buying companies and enshitifying them) or when something is done, but they go and break it (because growth).

As a customer, it feels like companies don’t care about your needs and wants. Like Slack and Dropbox enabling content scanning without consent.

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