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The man who killed Google Search?

(www.wheresyoured.at)
1884 points elorant | 12 comments | 23 Apr 24 16:43 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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gregw134 ◴[23 Apr 24 20:15 UTC] No.40136741[source]▶
Ex-Google search engineer here (2019-2023). I know a lot of the veteran engineers were upset when Ben Gomes got shunted off. Probably the bigger change, from what I've heard, was losing Amit Singhal who led Search until 2016. Amit fought against creeping complexity. There is a semi-famous internal document he wrote where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning, or at least contain it as much as possible, so that ranking stays debuggable and understandable by human search engineers. My impression is that since he left complexity exploded, with every team launching as many deep learning projects as they can (just like every other large tech company has).

The problem though, is the older systems had obvious problems, while the newer systems have hidden bugs and conceptual issues which often don't show up in the metrics, and which compound over time as more complexity is layered on. For example: I found an off by 1 error deep in a formula from an old launch that has been reordering top results for 15% of queries since 2015. I handed it off when I left but have no idea whether anyone actually fixed it or not.

I wrote up all of the search bugs I was aware of in an internal document called "second page navboost", so if anyone working on search at Google reads this and needs a launch go check it out.

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JohnFen ◴[23 Apr 24 20:24 UTC] No.40136833[source]▶
> where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning

This better echoes my personal experience with the decline of Google search than TFA: it seems to be connected to the increasing use of ML in that the more of it Google put in, the worse the results I got were.

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fuzztester ◴[23 Apr 24 21:48 UTC] No.40137737[source]▶
Same here with YouTube, assuming they use ML, which is likely.

They routinely give me brain-dead suggestions such as to watch a video I just watched today or yesterday, among other absurdities.

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gverrilla ◴[23 Apr 24 22:49 UTC] No.40138255{3}[source]▶
YT Shorts recommendations are a joke. I'm an atheist and very rarely watch anything related to religion, and even so Shorts put me in 3 or 4 live prayers/scams (not sure) the last few months.
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1. AlexCoventry ◴[24 Apr 24 00:44 UTC] No.40139142{4}[source]▶
YT Shorts itself is kind of a mystery to me. It's an objective degradation of the interface; why on earth would I want to use it? It doesn't even allow adjustment of the playback speed or scrubbing!
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2. fuzztester ◴[24 Apr 24 01:07 UTC] No.40139268[source]▶
Solid point. Not to mention that Shorts content is mainly linkbait and/or garbage.
3. barnabyjones ◴[24 Apr 24 01:55 UTC] No.40139586[source]▶
I think there is a large demo of people now who actually prefer to watch videos in portrait.
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4. minetest2048 ◴[24 Apr 24 02:40 UTC] No.40139877[source]▶
You can scrub on the mobile player, that's what makes it so much frustrating because you can't do that on desktop
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5. fuzztester ◴[24 Apr 24 03:37 UTC] No.40140267[source]▶
What does scrubbing mean in this context? Blocking the Shorts?
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6. mondobe ◴[24 Apr 24 04:00 UTC] No.40140405{3}[source]▶
Seeking to a certain part of the video. On mobile, you can do it by dragging the progress bar at the bottom of the screen.
7. nevster ◴[24 Apr 24 04:05 UTC] No.40140435{3}[source]▶
Scrubbing means quickly moving the current playback position back and forward
8. skydhash ◴[24 Apr 24 04:32 UTC] No.40140605[source]▶
If you’re watching a single subject of interest video on your phone (TikTok type of content), it’s great. But landscape videos is more pleasant and there’s a reason we move from 4:3 for media. But that actually means watching the videos, but what I see is a lot of skipping.
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9. kmeisthax ◴[24 Apr 24 05:01 UTC] No.40140765[source]▶
So, there's a few ways to explain it. From a business strategy level, TikTok exists, and is a threat to YouTube, so we need to compete with it.

From a user perspective, Shorts highlights a specific format of YouTube that happened to have been around for a lot longer than people realize. TikTok isn't anything new, Vine was doing exactly the same thing TikTok was a decade prior. It was shut down for what I can only assume was really dumb reasons. A lot of Viners moved to YouTube, but they had to change their creative process to fit what the YouTube algorithm valued at the time: longer videos.

Pre-Shorts, there really wasn't a good place on YouTube for short videos. Animators were getting screwed by the algorithm because you really can't do daily uploads of animation[0] and whatever you upload is going to be a few minutes max. A video essayist can rack up hundreds of thousands of hours of watch time while you get maybe a thousand.

(Fun fact: YouTube Shorts status was applied retroactively to old short videos, so there's actually Shorts that are decades old. AFAIK, some of the Petscop creator's old videos are Shorts now.)

But that's why users or creators would want to use Shorts. A lot of the UX problems with Shorts boils down to YouTube building TikTok inside of YouTube out of sheer corporate envy. To be clear, they could have used the existing player and added short-video features on top (e.g. swipe-to-skip). In fact, any Short can be opened in the standard player by just changing the URL! There's literally no difference other than a worse UI because SOMEONE wanted "launched a new YouTube vertical" on their promo packet!

FWIW the Shorts player is gradually getting its missing features back but it's still got several pain points for me. One in particular that I think exemplifies Shorts: if I watch Shorts on a portrait 1080p monitor - i.e. the perfect thing to watch vertical video on - you can't see comments. When you open the comments drawer it doesn't move over enough and the comments get cut off. The desktop experience is also really bad; occasionally scrolling just stops working, or it skips two videos per mousewheel event, or one video will just never play no matter how much I scroll back and forth.

[0] Vtubers don't count

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10. watwut ◴[24 Apr 24 06:49 UTC] No.40141429[source]▶
I dont mind portrait. I mind inability to jump forward in the video.
11. immibis ◴[28 Apr 24 22:14 UTC] No.40192455{3}[source]▶
Landscape videos were more pleasant on landscape screens, which are rarely used now, so they aren't more pleasant now.
12. AlexCoventry ◴[05 May 24 22:45 UTC] No.40269296[source]▶
Thanks, that was helpful.