Google Search

Report: Google pushes for better answers amid Reddit blackout, ‘users don’t want blue links’

Ben Schoon | Jun 27 2023 - 6:57 am PT

Google Search is a powerful tool if you know how to use it, and one of the best tricks for getting good answers from real people is appending “Reddit” to your query. Amid the Reddit blackout, though, Google executives are seeing reason to double down on surfacing “comprehensive answers” in Search through user-generated content and generative AI.

Over the years, Google Search queries have lost their immediate usefulness, with results often burying the right answers under sometimes outdated or often spammy content that is focused solely on driving clicks from search to generate ad revenue. As a result, many have moved to adding “Reddit” to their searches to get answers from real people. With the ongoing Reddit blackout, though, many of those searches have become inaccessible, with Google’s results leading to inaccessible pages as the communities have gone private.

A report from CNET dives into an “all-hands” meeting in Google earlier this month. The focus of that meeting revolved around a focus on “working on ways for search to display helpful resources in results without requiring users to add ‘Reddit’ to their searches,” the report notes.

Prabhakar Raghavan, SVP at Google over Search, said:

Many of you may wonder how we have a search team that’s iterating and building all this new stuff and yet somehow, users are still not quite happy. We need to make users happy.

That came in response to an employee question about how Google can improve the experience of Search when users are complaining of “too many ads and irrelevant results” on the “core product that made Google a household name.”

One way that Google has publicly announced to help with this is a new “Perspectives” tab in Search that will surface answers to queries based on user-generated content from sites such as YouTube, Quora, TikTok, and, of course, Reddit.

Sundar Pichai also chimed in on the meeting, saying that users don’t want “blue links” and are rather in search of “comprehensive answers.”

Raghavan also added that generative AI, a huge area of focus for Google and even more so its competitors, “won’t fully solve this issue.”

9to5Google’s Take

Rather than focusing on surfacing answers from social media or tasking an AI to generate them, Google would do well to focus on making traditional search results actually helpful – those results are what made the company a household name.

In 2022, Google claimed to be focusing on elevating content that is helpful and designed for people rather than rankings, but over a year later, that “update” has seemingly changed nothing. And, all the while, Google has rather opened the floodgates for AI-generated content to make it even harder to find genuine information in Search.

“Comprehensive answers” exist through traditional search, but Google has been unrestricted in letting mountains of SEO spam and a focus on selling ads bury those results.