Google users have appended “reddit” to their search queries for years, hoping the in-depth conversations found on the social media site can give a more fleshed-out answer to their questions than Google’s normal list of search results.
Reddit’s ongoing user revolt, by making many of those conversations “private”, has disrupted that trick, and Google now knows that chaos on a different site is making its search engine worse.
In the wake of the Reddit blackout and the ensuing problems at Google's search engine, Google employees challenged executives at an all-hands meeting earlier this month to ask what they were doing to improve search, the company's core product, CNBC reports.
Google’s search engine wasn’t providing the answers users wanted, executives admitted. "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," said Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president for search, during the meeting.
Users increasingly want “more comprehensive answers” rather than a list of “blue links,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai added.
On Friday, Google launched the “Perspectives” feature for its search engine, which allows users to see posts and videos from around the internet—including from Reddit. Google says the feature will be surfaced for queries “that might benefit from the experiences of others,” according to a blog post published in May.
Is Google search under threat?
Google is worried that new A.I. technologies, like OpenAI’s viral chatbot ChatGPT, will threaten its longstanding dominance in internet search.
Microsoft jumped on the new technology, integrating it into its long-struggling Bing search engine. Google quickly launched its own chatbot, Google Bard, and announced plans to integrate A.I. into its suite of Google products, including search.
Yet Raghavan admitted in Google’s all-hands meeting that generative A.I., like Bard, “won’t fully solve” the company’s issues with search, saying engineers needed to “do a better job” of addressing “new and emerging needs” like the desire for more comprehensive information.
Google did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment. A Google spokesperson told CNBC that the company's current search offering “satisfies the overwhelming majority of user needs,”, and the company is “always improving Search to meet the evolving needs of every one of our users."
Google still dominates the market for internet search, with 93% of users using its search engine in May, according to web analytics company Statcounter. Microsoft’s Bing sits in second place with 3% market share.
What’s happening with Reddit?
Reddit’s moderators, largely unpaid volunteers who manage the social media website’s communities, are protesting a new policy by the company to charge for access to its data. The decision threatened to end a wide range of third-party apps and tools that interacted with the site’s user-submitted content.
Moderators took many of Reddit’s most popular communities, called “subreddits”, private in protest, initially for 48 hours, and then for longer as company leadership refused to change course. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has said in interviews that the company won’t negotiate on a “business decision,” and that users found the widespread protest “annoying.”
Many subreddits have since reopened, though some moderators claim this happened after Reddit threatened to replace them with more pliable volunteers and ultimately force communities back open.
Moderators on Monday signed an open letter calling on Reddit to allow apps to make an “affordable return” to the platform and to appoint a “volunteer advocate.” Reddit, in turn, has pledged to make accessibility tools available on its official apps.
Reddit is reportedly planning an IPO for later in the year.
