You should try to assume good faith when engaging with a person who’s just like yourself.
First, we can agree that Google Search is attempting to solve an astronomically hard problem. Like mind boggling hard. Indexing the entire web and serving quality results to unstructured queries from billions of users every day in under one second is no small feat.
Second, Google is not monolithic. We employ more people than most cities have citizens. Furthermore, many more people than our current staff have come and gone over our 20+ year existence. It’s better to think of Google as an organic entity than a rigid command-and-control hierarchy. Are you able to think of a city in the world that does everything perfectly? I certainly can’t, and yet, there are cities that are better and those that are worse for any set of criteria that one may care about. As it is with large companies like Google.
Third, while there’s an objective element to search result quality, there’s also a significant amount of subjectivity. Your idea of quality results may differ from another person’s idea.
Checkout Paul Haahr’s talk on “Improving Search over the Years” [1]. He summarizes our work the best when he says things that look easy on the outside can take a lot of work to implement.
As it was with our state-of-the-art automatic synonym system that works on any written language in our corpus. (More details in his presentation.) This system is a transparent workhorse from the user’s perspective.
Here’s a simple example you can compare between Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo: “united flight formations”.
Two of those search engines will show a bunch of things about United Airlines as top results because that’s what you would expect to get when you’re only focused on matching terms. Only one of those search engines understands the meaning behind the query and returns everything to do with formation flying as the top results.
If you use our products and you mostly enjoy our products, it’s in your best interest to give feedback when you feel we’re not serving your needs. You’ll find that most of products, Search included, have open feedback channels that we do review and act upon.
I'm sure you're a real person deserving of respect and love. If I say that the search results are terrible it's not a comment on your humanity or that if your colleagues. People have genuine problems with Google and a reasonable expectation based on experience that they won't get any joy by trying to appeal to big G. You can say that you're just flesh and blood, but don't discount the well-founded displeasure of users.
First, we can agree that Google Search is attempting to solve an astronomically hard problem. Like mind boggling hard. Indexing the entire web and serving quality results to unstructured queries from billions of users every day in under one second is no small feat.
Second, Google is not monolithic. We employ more people than most cities have citizens. Furthermore, many more people than our current staff have come and gone over our 20+ year existence. It’s better to think of Google as an organic entity than a rigid command-and-control hierarchy. Are you able to think of a city in the world that does everything perfectly? I certainly can’t, and yet, there are cities that are better and those that are worse for any set of criteria that one may care about. As it is with large companies like Google.
Third, while there’s an objective element to search result quality, there’s also a significant amount of subjectivity. Your idea of quality results may differ from another person’s idea.
Checkout Paul Haahr’s talk on “Improving Search over the Years” [1]. He summarizes our work the best when he says things that look easy on the outside can take a lot of work to implement.
As it was with our state-of-the-art automatic synonym system that works on any written language in our corpus. (More details in his presentation.) This system is a transparent workhorse from the user’s perspective.
Here’s a simple example you can compare between Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo: “united flight formations”.
Two of those search engines will show a bunch of things about United Airlines as top results because that’s what you would expect to get when you’re only focused on matching terms. Only one of those search engines understands the meaning behind the query and returns everything to do with formation flying as the top results.
If you use our products and you mostly enjoy our products, it’s in your best interest to give feedback when you feel we’re not serving your needs. You’ll find that most of products, Search included, have open feedback channels that we do review and act upon.
[1]: https://youtu.be/DeW-9fhvkLM