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Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai delivers the keynote address at the Google I/O developer conference at Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, Calif., May 10, 2023.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Google Users have long been able to append their search queries to the term “Reddit” to find helpful resources on specific topics.
When thousands of Reddit forums went dark earlier this month, this was the tactic It has lost its effectiveness. Many pages in search results are suddenly unavailable or unhelpful, because moderators on some of the most popular forums have turned their pages private as part of a widespread outcry over Reddit’s decision to start charging developers for access to its data.
It’s a problem Google executives say has been at least partially solved by a new feature called Google Outlook – Perspectives which was unveiled on Monday. The Perspectives tab, now available on the mobile web and Google app in the US, promises to launch discussion forums and videos from social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Reddit and Quora.
At a panel meeting earlier this month, Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s vice president in charge of search, told employees that the company is working on ways for search to display useful resources in results without requiring users to add “Reddit” to their searches. Raghavan admitted that users were frustrated with the experience.
“Many of you may be wondering how we have a research team that is iterating and building all this new stuff and yet, somehow, users are still not completely happy,” said Raghavan. “We need to make users happy.”
Raghavan was responding to an employee’s comment about negative user feedback due to too many ads and inappropriate results. “What can we do to improve the user experience on the core product that made Google such a household name?” the employee asked, according to an audio recording of the meeting obtained by CNBC.
Google is trying to revamp search to catch up with competitors in taking advantage of the latest advances in generative AI, which includes providing more complex, speaking answers to textual queries.
At its annual developer conference in May, the company said it was experimenting with an effort called Generative Search Experience, Which still isn’t for everyone, and shows more in-depth results powered by generative AI. Google also launched a ChatGPT competitor called Bard earlier this year. Bard remains separate from the research and is still in beta mode.
Google’s Prabhakar Raghavan speaks during the company’s Cloud Next ’18 event in San Francisco, Calif., July 24, 2018.
David Paul Morris | bloomberg | Getty Images
Another asked an employee at the company-wide meeting whether Google could display a “real discussion” more easily since the “Reddit blackout” was making such content hard to find.
CEO Sundar Pichai believed it to say that users don’t want “blue links” so much as “more comprehensive answers”. He said this is why they add forum site names like Reddit to their searches.
HJ Kim, vice president of engineering for search, said at the meeting that users are asking for more content from sites like Reddit. He said the Perspectives tab is one feature the company is working on in response, but it could do a better job.
“Over the past couple of years, search in general has developed these large cross-functional teams to pursue this type of content,” Kim said, referring to Reddit. “We can do better. We’re aware of that. And over the last couple of years, we’ve really evolved quite a bit.”
Raghavan said Google will determine what is “getting the best traction.”
“But the idea is there for these questions, where there are multiple opinions, rather than appending things, you really go there and get the answer right away and we’re really seeing good early engagement in that,” Raghavan said.
He added that while the company spends a lot of time on artificial intelligence, it is not the only solution to the problem.
“Generative AI is one aspect but it won’t completely solve this problem – I want to be clear,” he said. “We already have teams experimenting” with one perspective as an example.
“We have to keep up and do a better job of meeting these new and emerging needs,” he said.
Google spokeswoman Lara Levine told CNBC in a statement that search “fulfills the vast majority of our users’ needs, and we’re always working to improve search to meet the evolving needs of each of our users.”
“Features like the perspective filter are part of how we make sure people continue to find the most useful information on Google from a wide range of sources and formats,” said Levine.
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