[theptip]

Agreed. It’s really weird; because of the bundling advantage, they don’t have to be better than Notion, they just need to be good enough that the convenience factor wins out.

It’s also frustrating because if Google played to their strengths, Docs could be best-in-class; the real problem that everybody is struggling with is internal knowledge management. Why can’t Google build me a privately indexed knowledge graph of my internal docs, then let me use Google’s search to answer questions? It’s insane that this is not their product strategy for Docs. This should be “easy” to wire up, they have all of the tech already for google.com search.

People like notion because it is easier to structure nested Wiki docs quickly, but you still have the same problems eventually of needing to curate your knowledge base, and things becoming too hard to find past a certain scale.

Instead we get Data Loss Prevention and a bunch of other box-ticking features which, sure, are how you close enterprise deals to displace Microsoft. But I think they are sleeping on their vulnerability to disruption plays from the bottom of the market, and they need to invest more in building a moat here. Make the free/SMB customers delighted, and you starve potential competitors of the oxygen they need to grow into a competitor at the enterprise level.

[Lealen]

It's probably not available because someone decided that it should be only available for enterprise customers, take a look: https://workspace.google.com/products/cloud-search/

[theptip]

Thanks, I wasn’t aware of that feature (and I pay for Enterprise gsuite, so that tells you something about either my attention to Google product details, or the level of advertisement of this feature :)

I do wonder if this is actually building a semantic knowledge graph of the content, vs. just providing a dynamic facade/aggregator for other apps’ search APIs, and doing “old style” text indexing/searching within Workspace services. It looks like the former based on a cursory read of the docs.

It would be more challenging to build a knowledge graph over {drive,slack,Jira,…} documents, but if they just build a knowledge graph within Workspace that could provide more reason to use Docs vs. Notion/Confluence, or Google Chat over Slack. So there is actually a strong product/market reason to build this as a native feature even if you can’t solve it for other apps.

[polote]

> Why can’t Google build me a privately indexed knowledge graph of my internal docs

Not easy to do [1]. But that's what we try to to at Dokkument [2]

And also knowledge is spread around different tools, Github, monday, JIRA, Confluence, Slack. It is not all on Google Docs. And is Google is not the most integrated product

> People like notion because it is easier to structure nested Wiki docs quickly

I don't feel like it is the case. You can't retrieve anything unless you know the title of the document or you have saves the URL. Most people don't prefer Notion and some do, because they are list-addicted people, and it is easier to list documents in Notions than in Google Sheet. Notion doesn't fix any knowledge management problems compared to using Google Drive. And Confluence still makes circles around Notion in that area

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28597895

[2] https://dokkument.com

[catmanjan]

I’m not convinced Googles smart knowledge engine would work in that environment, it probably relies on lots of people doing lots of searches and clicking links etc

Compared to only the searches being done by a single business and no links in documents