Comment by eitally
7 months ago
I was there from 2015-2023 and, although I didn't work in Search, I remember a lot of the bigger initiatives designed at improving Search for users, like the project to add cards for the top 500 most commonly searched medical terms/conditions, using content from Mayo and custom contracted digital art (for an example, here's a sample link: https://www.google.com/search?q=acl+tear ). There were a lot of things like this going on at any point in time, and it was terrific to see. Then I discovered the manually curated internal knowledge graph, that even included many-language i19n. And then that it was possible for any googler to suggest updates/changes/additions.
Point being, there's a lot of amazing stuff that folks on the outside never would have seen, and it would be a shame for beancounters to ruin it all with decisions actively not "respecting the user".
That amazing internal knowledge graph you're talking about folks on the outside never seeing? That is very ironic because that knowledge graph used to be Freebase.com and a lot of the data came from the open data community who volunteered their efforts and expertise. Then Google bought Metaweb and shut down Freebase.