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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, California, May 10, 2023.
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Google users have long been able to add their searches with the term “Reddit” to find helpful resources on specific topics.
When thousands of Reddit forums went dark earlier this month, that tactic was lost its effectiveness. Many pages in search results were suddenly inaccessible or useless, as moderators at some of the most popular forums made their pages private as part of a widespread protest against Reddit’s decision to charge developers to access its data.
It’s a problem that Google executives say has been at least partially solved by a new feature called Perspectives that was revealed on Monday. The Perspectives tab, now available on mobile web and the Google app in the US, promises discussion forums and videos from social media platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, Reddit and Quora.
At a general meeting earlier this month, Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president responsible for search, told employees that the company was working on ways to display helpful resources in search results without users adding “Reddit” to their searches had to add . Raghavan acknowledged that users had become frustrated with the experience.
“A lot of you might be wondering how we have a search team that iterates and builds all this new stuff and yet somehow users are still not completely satisfied,” Raghavan said. “We need to make users happy.”
Raghavan was responding to an employee’s comment about negative user feedback due to too many ads and irrelevant results. “What can we do to improve the user experience on the core product that has made Google a household name?” the employee asked, according to meeting audio obtained by CNBC.
Google is trying to revamp its search to keep up with rivals by taking advantage of the latest developments in generative artificial intelligence, bringing more sophisticated and conversational answers to text-based queries.
At its annual developer conference in May, the company said it was experimenting with an effort called Search Generative Experience, which is still not available to everyone and shows more in-depth results powered by generative AI. Google also launched a ChatGPT competitor called Bard earlier this year. Bard remains separated from search and is still in experimental mode.
Prabhakar Raghavan, of Google Inc., speaks at the company’s Cloud Next ’18 event in San Francisco, California, July 24, 2018.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Another employee question at the company-wide meeting asked if Google could more easily bring out “authentic discussion” as the “Reddit blackout” made it harder to find such content.
CEO Sundar Pichai agreed to say that users don’t want “blue links” so much as “more comprehensive answers.” That’s why they add the name of forum sites like Reddit to their searches, he said.
HJ Kim, vice president of engineering in search, said at the meeting that users have been asking for more content from sites like Reddit. He said the Perspectives tab is a feature the company has worked on in response, but could do better.
“In recent years, search in general has evolved these large, cross-functional teams to go after this kind of content,” Kim said, referring to Reddit. “We could do better. We realize that. And in recent years we have developed quite a bit.”
Raghavan said Google would determine what “gets the best traction”.
“But the idea that’s there for these questions, where there’s multiple opinions, rather than adding things, you really go in there and get the answer right away and we’re actually seeing good early engagement on that,” Raghavan said .
He added that while the company spends a lot of time on AI, it’s not the only answer to the problem.
“Generative AI is one aspect, but it won’t completely solve this problem – I want to be clear,” he said. “We actually have teams doing experiments,” using Perspectives as an example.
“We need to keep up and better respond to these new and emerging needs,” he said.
Lara Levin, a spokeswoman for Google, told CNBC in a statement that search “meets the vast majority of user needs, and we’re always improving Search to meet the evolving needs of all of our users.”
“Features like the Perspectives filter are part of how we ensure people continue to find the most useful information on Google from a wide variety of sources and formats,” said Levin.
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