[rryan]

> No one at Google is responsible for these half baked and largely irrelevant widgets or wants to stake their career fixing them.

You're just ... wrong about this. There's an entire team of dozens of people (maybe hundreds now) focusing on this specific web answer feature. I personally worked on the team (not this feature, though).

I don't understand why people say things they know nothing about.

[onion2k]

I think it largely stems from this very popular comment from a couple of years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19553840 From an external point of view certainly seems to explain a lot of Google's issues with the stagnation and death of many of it's products.

The fact that there have been plenty of other comments from Googlers to back it up since shows that, in some parts of Google at least, there's a grain of truth there. It might not be the whole story, many teams might be proud of their part, and many Googlers may not be focusing on promition and shiny new things, but that doesn't really matter to Google's users. What we see has been plenty of Google products being killed off, or left to rot. Now even Search has people complaining about it. Startups are getting traction competing against it. A decade ago that would have been unthinkable.

If you're right and teams in Google do actually care about the older, less shiny things they build then Google has a significant brand and reputation problem. If you're wrong then Google has a massive engineering culture problem. Either way, Google has a problem.

[resonious]

I think people say this because some problems stick out like a sore thumb and stay that way for months if not years. The line of inference is that there must be no incentive inside the company to fix them.

[sangnoir]

Isn't this just the software engineering equivalent of the fundamental attribution problem? My backlog is long because I have important stuff(TM) to address, whereas their backlog is sign of dysfunction.

[6510]

> I don't understand why people say things they know nothing about.

Well, in all honesty I wonder how this exact same thing when reading the "answers".

I'm having visuals of someone repeatedly trying to throw something and missing the wall entirely.

Lets examine the original product implemented in wetware:

http://answers.google.com/answers/index.html

> "At the bottom of every question page we provide a link to [e-mail]. We encourage you to use this link whenever you see questionable content posted to the site. In your email, please provide information about the question, its ID number, and the reason you find the content questionable."

This one went through the wall!

You have no further questions.

[Der_Einzige]

And yet despite all of those people, the quality is bad and seems to get worse. A startup seems to be outcompeting them.

Sometimes industries or teams have effectively negative value, or their preconceived notions about how something works based on teachings from their field is wrong. This is the case for chiropractors (the whole field is useless / a net negative), vs back doctors.

We see this happening today with Google moving away from traditional and high quality techniques like direct keyword ranking, bm25, and pagerank and move towards lower quality methods based on hype such as BERT/other "semantic search" based on LMs, query rewriting, and using these dense vectors directly in pagerank (and this degrading it).

The amazing power of language models in certain domains (text generation) has unfortunately caused a proliferation of them in a place where they are still pretty bad (information retrieval and search).

Google is full of search chiropractors when they need search back doctors.

[jeffybefffy519]

Instant answers is terrible, its someone’s interpretation of something rather then letter me decide.