2013 Founders’ Letter

Google search is an enigma to me. I oscillate from being blown away by its intelligence and accuracy to being gobsmacked by its stupidity and inefficiency. For all tech related related search terms I usually have no issues with Google, but that is in large part thanks to stackoverflow. As soon as I venture out of anything having to do with tech I find myself lost in a wilderness of content farms a million miles wide and only an inch deep. I&#x27;m pretty internet savvy so I can eventually navigate my way to half-way decent answers, but I can only imagine how frustratingly useless google must seem to people who can&#x27;t recognize the tell-tale signs of junk content.<p>I find the most effective way to search is to already know where the most knowledgeable people gather around a specific topic and use google to search those sites specifically. I will often search within the context of content aggregators like hacker news, reddit, stackexchange, and other various forums before I rely on a naked Google search but it&#x27;s a kludge at best and not something less tech savvy people are going to know how to do. And if I&#x27;m completely new to a topic it&#x27;s often a chore just to even find the place where the experts actually hang out.<p>I think the approach that Stackexchange is taking is going to be far more valuable in terms of search over the long run than Google. Time should be spent on figuring out how to reward domain knowledge experts and making sure they stay untainted and motivated to share their knowledge rather than tweaking a search algorithm in an endless cat-and-mouse game played with content farms.

I think the one of Larry Page&#x27;s dreams is very different to most people&#x27;s dreams, which would be one that respects people&#x27;s right to privacy.

I don&#x27;t think people realize how much better Google search has gotten over the years. We tend to remember the annoyances or failures, and not remember all of the successes that are second nature to us.<p>Consider vague long tail queries. Google knocks these out of the park compared to Bing, DDG or others. Let&#x27;s say there&#x27;s some old movie you vaguely remember details about:<p>&quot;movie where evil is in microwave&quot; =&gt; Google &quot;Time Bandits&quot;. Bing: Nada. DDG: Nada<p>&quot;dystopian movie with a motorcycle named einstein&quot; =&gt; Google &quot;Warrior of the Lost World&quot; Bing: wrong, DDG: wrong<p>&quot;song about cocaine in california&quot; =&gt; Google: Hotel California, Bing, DDG: bottom of page<p>&quot;star trek episode where spock is possessed&quot; =&gt; Google: Return to Tomorrow, Bing&#x2F;DDG: Spock&#x27;s Brain (wrong), but nice try&quot;<p>&quot;previous name of java language&quot; =&gt; Google: link to Oak as second item, Bing&#x2F;DDG: worse result (must click through links to find answer)<p>&quot;cartoon about plants and a kid with a ring&quot; =&gt; Google: Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, Bing&#x2F;DDG: Nope<p>&quot;tv show with scientist named blackwood&quot; =&gt; This one is EASY, Google: War of the Worlds, Bing&#x2F;DDG: Nope<p>&quot;guy who tried to bomb parliament&quot; =&gt; Google: Direct Answer, Others: links<p>&quot;tv show with alien who has necklace powered by sun&quot; =&gt; Google: 1st result, The Phoenix, Others: 3rd or lower<p>&quot;cartoon car that has auto jacks&quot; =&gt; Google: Speed Racer 2nd result, Others: nope<p>&quot;flying characters similar to thundercats&quot; =&gt; Google: Silverhawks, Others: nope<p>&quot;movie with guy who owns last car&quot; =&gt; Google: The Last Race, Others: nope<p>&quot;commodore 64 game where alien knocks on window&quot; =&gt; Google: Rescue on Fractalus, Others: nope<p>&quot;toy where you program trailer to dump&quot; =&gt; Google: Big Trak, Others: nope<p>You can play this game all day, trying to come up with the vaguest possible query about old things you remember bits and pieces of from decades ago, and I&#x27;m often amazed at how vague and obtuse I can get. Google does these queries much better than others. Yes, it fails a lot too, but the instances where it fails, and others succeed are much more rare than the instances where it succeeds and others fail.<p>But Google isn&#x27;t an AI yet. And what Larry is speaking about is achieving Star Trek: a computer that can read the meaning of words, understand, rather than just index characters.

We changed the url from [1], which just copies bits of the original. We also changed the title from the linkbaity (and ambiguous) [2].<p>Submitters: please do your due diligence and read what you post. An article of cherry-picked excerpts from a more original source is rarely a good HN submission. You should submit the original source instead.<p>1. <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/google-a-million-miles-away-from-creating-the-search-engine-of-my-dreams-says-larry-page-7000029485/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;google-a-million-miles-away-from-creati...</a><p>2. ‘Google &quot;a million miles away from creating the search engine of my dreams&quot;’

I&#x27;m nostalgic for the days I could click on my Google bookmark and start typing my search without the page missing my few first keystrokes because of slow loading.

At first, I read this as an imperative, and tried googling the phrase, &quot;a million miles away from the search engine of my dreams&quot;.

As a search&#x2F;deep learning engineer I am amazed at google, I think that the more you know about the subject, the more appreciative one becomes. Take, for example, their iOS search app. You just say &quot;ok google&quot; then often before I have even finished my question the results are shown, in that time it did continuous speech recognition, query parsing, intent detection, search, result generation and render on the device. That requires some very serious smarts. All so I can show &quot;show me pictures of c[ats]&quot;, results in at &quot;c&quot;...

That&#x27;s because Google is in the business of adwords, advertising, robots, eyewear &amp; building servers&#x2F;computers&#x2F;clusters, not search.

A billion Android devices. That&#x27;s truly remarkable.

The perfect search engine is fundamentally devastating to Google&#x27;s business model.<p>The perfect search engine would always take you to exactly what you were looking for immediately.<p>Which means, no amount of advertising would ever be useful, since you wouldn&#x27;t need to be advertised to - you&#x27;d type what you wanted and it would show you <i>exactly</i> that.

It annoys me that it doesn&#x27;t search users blogs and things that well. I&#x27;m often searching for what real people have to say, not content farms etc I know spam blogs are the cause, but the results are still frustrating.

AI can change the world. I guess this is Page million miles away goal.