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Comment by pwg | Hacker News Reader

> Why has a search company

Google was a search company, many years ago.

Today's Google is an advertising company that just happens to have a legacy search division.

This. As an interview question for my product managers, I often ask what Google search's product is. The ones who say ads move to the next round.

The product of Search is data and attention. They use this data and attention to sell their Ads product.

The same can be said for almost everything they make.

If Google's customers are the advertisers, maybe the correct answer is "attention".

Totally valid response :-) And I think that's another great angle as well that you can bring to a conundrum like Gmail or Google Search, like Time to Value or Engagement, etc.

As an extension, what we're seeing with OpenAi et al. is that they are capturing that attention and taking search with them. And so (as I referred to a couple comments down) OpenAI and the others are in the Google pre-2006 moment where the products are highly successfully engaging and grabbing our attention, but they haven't quite found the business model that prints money in the way Google Ads do.

So we'll see. What do you think?

Are you aware what you are saying about yourself by writing such a sentence?

This has got to be one of the most loaded question I have ever seen on here. Could you perhaps be clearer with what you want to ask? It sounds like you are insinuating that the guy is a bad person in some vague, nondescript way.

Agreed. And I added an update to give a more thoughtful response. I've been on the receiving side of trick questions, so I do understand. How you ask the question, which I didn't phrase here, is important. Google Search or Gmail are great case study style questions. Here's an oldie but a goodie about it from 2006:

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=33707

To answer your question: I am insinuating nothing. There is a certain vibe to his comments which struck me from having noticed it in certain people, and the effects it has on their relationships with others. From his answer, I gather that he doesn't care. So, that's it for the free remote psychoanalysis by HN comments.

Trick questions like those have a terrible signal to noise ratio, you'd hope people with recruiting decision power would have gotten the memo by now.

You clearly decided to interpret that question in a way that would make you feel better about yourself, and I am disappointed.

Somehow this website is not what it used to be.

Yup, but my earlier comment was a bit flippant, so here’s a more in-depth response.

It was an answer to the OP’s question about why Gmail search feels broken, and a nod to the previous comment pointing out Google’s core business is selling ads. In that context, Gmail isn’t optimized for superior search. It’s part of a data funnel that enables keyword targeting, ad placement, and behavioral profiling.

For me, there’s a deeper product lesson here, but also a signal about how someone thinks. Whether a candidate answers “ads” or “search” or “email” isn’t what really matters. It’s the why behind the answer that matters most.

At the end of the day, business models directly shape product decisions. That tension is something every product manager has to navigate because they sit between the business and technical sides of a company. Being able to see and articulate that tradeoff, especially when user needs diverge from monetization incentives, is key to both building effectively and being a successful product manager.

More often the business model, like subscriptions, is more tightly connected to the product. User has X problem that product Y solves and the company receives Z dollars in exchange for access. However, there are many examples where the pricing or monetization strategy is not so clearly connected to the feature set, of which google search is a great example.

For the record, I don't ask this question to junior PMs.

You are doing your job well, and for that I salute you.

However, you highlight the real problem with ad-supported tech. It creates perverse incentives that makes the world an objectively worse place for most just to sell another ad. It justifies actions and data collection that would be illegal if it were anything other than a large corporation peforming that activity. At some point in history the words, "just trying to make my quarterly numbers", will be looked at with the same level of horror and shame as a similar phrase was over 75 years ago.

How does compromising the ability to search your inbox increase ad revenue?

Probably made other tweaks that gave marginal gains in ad revenue whilst neither caring nor measuring about the effect on search results.

Presumably ad revenue has gone up even as search result quality has gone down, proving that the ability to search your inbox is actually unimportant.

Unimportant, or unprofitable?

Computation costs probably not worth it for the incremental user satisfaction.

I'm assuming whatever they're currently doing involves machine learning so uses more compute than the simple correct solution that a CS freshman could code up.

Is probably less about making as revenue and more about not investing in it

Well said. Feels like search is now just the wrapper around the ad engine, not the core mission anymore.

gmail search was never good though.

It’s exponentially better than Outlook.

I think it is a hard problem that requires a lot of work to get right. The ancient “Google Desktop Search” from 20 years ago was probably the best email search I’ve seen. Products like that require alot of man-hours and are expensive.

Better than Outlook?

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