[jahnu]

Playing devil's advocate here (a little) but imagine they took a few dozen million of that and, say, improved their development tool chains for Android (which are disappointingly flaky). Or another few dozen millions and extended the security updates for Nexus phones by a couple of years. That could grow their market share of both developer mind-share and consumers.

Moonshots maybe should come once you've mastered all your core products?

[Normal_gaussian]

> Moonshots maybe should come once you've mastered all your core products?

Then they'll never come.

[jahnu]

They mastered search. They mastered mapping.

[redthrowaway]

Search has stagnated. Google has gotten scarily good at anticipating what I want to know, but conspicuously bad at answering hard questions. There's tons of room for improvement.

Similarly, Google Maps has added features that make it a better map, and it's a great place to find what time a store closes and what their phone number is. But it's been essentially the same service, with iterative improvements, for years. There's a world of possible uses for that data beyond what we imagine when we think of a map.

[sievebrain]

I suspect Google Search has not actually had quality regressions, but rather that your expectations have gone up over time without you realising it.

[redthrowaway]

Yes, I might have phrased that poorly. Google Search still finds relevant web pages just as well as it did 5 years ago, perhaps better. It certainly has leveraged the data it collects on me to suggest search terms in a way that's almost eerie.

But it's still a tool to find relevant pages, not a tool to find answers. It's made some progress with the semantic web and knowledge graph, but that still provides basic facts about people, places, and things. At its core, it's still a portal. It's still just a much better version of Excite. Search today feels like it did in 1997: a "solved problem" ripe for disruption. Google has the talent, technology, and data to produce something an order of magnitude better.

[matwood]

This. It used to be the first page of results was good enough. Now if it is not in the top 3-4, I refine my query.

[Vexs]

I think the biggest issue with google right now is they have so many simple answers available. If I google some even slightly in depth problem, I'm bombarded with quarter explanations from "popular" sites like howtogeek, cnet wikihow, etc, which as far as I remember have never helped me one bit.

They seem to rely too much on site popularity, and not enough about quality of result, and god help you if you try to google a higher-level math problem.

[Roedou]

Some of the updates over the last year or so will put Google in a better position to increasingly put quality over popularity. There's still going to be a problem that people seem to trust Wikihow, etc...

Regarding the math problems: do you have an example of a query for which there's a good result on the internet, but Google doesn't return it?

[tudorw]

I agree, I think search is ripe for disruption, Google is the old guard in this respect, I think they reached a crossroads where improvements in their search experience did not translate to increased revenue, and they stuck with this 'good enough' solution which made a predictable amount of money. I still show many users the 'filter by date' drop down and it's the first time they have seen it, it still does not offer me any way to restrict my searches to categories, though it certainly seems to have 'knowledge' based data in reach when it shows me adverts. There is surely much more that can be done, most competitors seem to want to match reach rather than innovate on the UI, I'm sure there are lots of startups out there, so if anyone wants to point me in the right direction feel free :)

[Lordarminius]

>Search has stagnated. Google has gotten...

Who downvoted this and why?

[_pmf_]

> Google has gotten scarily good at anticipating what I want to know, but conspicuously bad at answering hard questions.

Well, 98 percent of the market is not asking hard questions, so by dropping support, they are actually making their search product more tailored towards their market.

[slmyers]

Is anything truly "mastered"?

[lorenzhs]

Just yesterday I got a blank result page for a sensible query, seems to have hit some rarely visited bucket combined with a busy machine somewhere or the like, and the background request timed out. Of course a refresh fixed it, but software is never perfect.

[iopq]

It's not "perfect", it's just "mastered"

[ZenoArrow]

What's the difference?

[SXX]

Probably "mastered" mean constant quality.

[iopq]

A grandmaster chess player has mastered chess, but he can't play perfectly because he's still a human.

[ryporter]

Google is perfectly able to invest a few dozen million in the Android development chain, if they so desire. If they don't, and if you're right that it would be a good investment, then that's simply a bad decision made by Google proper.

Alphabet is trying to learn from the mistakes of their predecessor tech giants, who continued to focus almost exclusively on their current money spinners, only to wind up completely missing the boat on the Next Big Thing (tm).

[yoz-y]

I think that they are already investing quite a lot into the Android development toolchain and probably more investment would not make things go faster.

That being said, it does indeed need a lot of improvement.

[on_and_off]

TBH, it feels like they are already ramping up the Android team.

The support lib development pace seemed to have really picked up some steam this year.

Of course they could do more, for example :

- a really open support lib repo where you can really easily push contributions on something like github, gitlab, etc..

- start working on a replacement for Java .. Java 10 is better than what we have right now but still way behind kotlin or swift..

- do even more in the support lib. They are dozen of points of the material specs not covered by the platform right now.

- do something about android updates. It looks like a political issue though, so not sure there is a solution.

I don't feel like they are not investing in Android though, all the contrary.

[matwood]

The Android tool chain has improved A LOT over the years. I used to want to throw my computer every time I was forced to do something in our Android product, now it is only a mild annoyance. Compared to iOS it still has a ways to go though.

[wastedhours]

Since Other Bets are separate in Alphabet (compared to Google), these aren't technically Google's investments offset by revenues, so would actually be losses for Alphabet as an org, no?

[landryraccoon]

A lot of world class engineers would leave Google to go to their competition. The promise of maybe getting to work on self driving cars is a big recruiting carrot. Improve ad revenue by 0.01%? Will that motivate a top 1% engineer to sign or stick around?

[markcerqueira]

> Improved their development tool chains for Android

A true moonshot! :) and :( at the same time...

[kalleboo]

> improved their development tool chains for Android (which are disappointingly flaky).

To compete with what, Xcode?

Strategically they're almost better off inspiring others to make better third-party Android dev tools to open up the space