Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai delivers the keynote speech at the Google I/O developer conference at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California, on May 10, 2023.
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Google Users have long been able to add the word “Reddit” to a search query to find helpful resources on a particular topic.
When thousands of Reddit forums went dark earlier this month, the strategy Lost potency. Many pages in search results are suddenly inaccessible or useless, as moderators of some of the most popular forums turned their pages private as part of a widespread protest over Reddit’s decision to start charging developers for accessing their data.
Google executives say the problem can be solved by at least one View It was announced on Monday. The Perspectives tab is now available on the mobile web and the Google app in the US and promises to display discussion forums and videos from social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Reddit and Quora.
In an all-hands meeting earlier this month, Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president for search, told employees the company was working on ways to make search show useful resources in results rather than Require users to add “Reddit” to their search. Raghavan acknowledged that users were frustrated with the experience.
“Many of you may be wondering how we have a search team that iterates and builds all this new stuff, but somehow users are still not too happy,” Raghavan said. “We need to keep our users happy.”
Raghavan was responding to employee comments about negative user feedback due to too many ads and irrelevant results. “What can we do to improve the user experience of the core products that make Google a household name?” the employee asked, according to audio of the meeting obtained by CNBC.
Google is trying to improve search to keep pace with rivals, taking advantage of recent advances in generative artificial intelligence, which includes more sophisticated conversational answers to text-based queries.
At its annual developer conference in May, the company said it was experimenting with a project called “Search-Generated Experience,” This is still not available to everyone, and it shows deeper results powered by generative artificial intelligence. Google also launched a ChatGPT competitor, Bard, earlier this year. Bard is still detached from search and is still in experimental mode.
Google Inc.’s Prabhakar Raghavan speaks at the company’s Cloud Next ’18 event on July 24, 2018 in San Francisco, California.
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Another employee question at the company-wide meeting was whether Google could more easily surface “real discussions,” since a “Reddit blackout” made it harder to find such content.
CEO Sundar Pichai chimed in to say that users didn’t want “blue links” but “more comprehensive answers.” That’s why they add the names of forum sites like Reddit to the search, he said.
Users have been asking sites like Reddit for more content, HJ Kim, vice president of search engineering, said at the conference. The Views tab is a feature the company has been working on, but it could be better, he said.
“Over the last few years, the search industry in general has developed these large cross-functional teams to track this kind of content,” Kim said of Reddit. “We can do better. We realize that. We’ve actually come a long way in the past few years.”
Raghavan said Google will decide what “gets the most attention.”
“But the idea with these questions is that if there’s multiple opinions, instead of add-ons, you can actually go in there and get an answer right away, and we’re actually seeing good early engagement on that,” Raghavan said.
He added that while the company is investing a lot of time in artificial intelligence, it’s not the only answer to the problem.
“Generative AI is one aspect, but it doesn’t quite solve the problem — I want to clarify,” he said. “We actually have teams doing experiments,” Perspectives is an example.
“We have to keep up and better meet these emerging needs,” he said.
Google spokeswoman Lara Levin told CNBC in a statement that search “satisfies the needs of the vast majority of our users, and we’re always improving Search to meet the changing needs of each user.”
“Features like the Perspectives filter are part of our effort to ensure that people continue to find the most useful information on Google from a variety of sources and formats,” said Levin.
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