Google Exec Testifies Innovation Key To Avoid Becoming 'Next Road Kill'

Google executive Prabhakar Raghavan on Thursday detailed challenges the search and advertising giant faces from smaller rivals, describing efforts to avoid becoming "the next road kill." From a report: Raghavan testified at the ongoing antitrust trial in the suit brought by the U.S. Justice Department and a coalition of state attorneys general, alleging Alphabet's Google unlawfully abused its dominance in the search-engine market to maintain monopoly power. Raghavan, asked about a 1998 article about Yahoo!'s dominance of search at the time, said he was acutely aware rivals from Expedia.com to Instagram to TikTok competed for users' attention.

"I feel a keen sense not to become the next road kill," said Raghavan, a senior vice president at Google who reports to chief executive Sundar Pichai. Raghavan said Google had some 8,000 engineers and product managers working on search, with about 1,000 involved in search quality. Raghavan's description of Google struggling to stay relevant clashed with the Justice Department's depiction of a behemoth that broke antitrust law to retain dominance of online search and some aspects of advertising, including paying an estimated $10 billion annually to smartphone makers and wireless carriers to be the default search engine on devices. Google's share of the search engine market is near 90%.

You're not roadkill

[subreality]

You're the fucking truck

Re:

[Nephilimi]

They know it, and they want to keep it that way.

Relevance?

[thegarbz]

Anti-competitive practices do not care how concerned you area about the competition. The only question is if you used market power anti-competitively to starve off the competition, a point which Google didn't seem to even defend against. Your concerns about your competition are not enumerated in anti-trust laws which makes this point somewhat irrelevant to the trial, even if it is true (I suspect it's not).

If this is all Google has to defend themselves, they are going to be in trouble.

Who do they think they're kidding?

[RonVNX]

If they're all so concerned about putting out a good product then why has it been deteriorating into increasingly rancid crap for years? These people sound like they have no idea where they actually work. Nobody working there is trying to make Google Search better, they're only trying to find ways to cram more ads into it.

"Innovation" suggests

[wakeboarder]

that google isn't currently innovating enough, and if you don't already know why they aren't innovating, it's because they are using anti-competitive practices to hold their position in the market. Most could agree that google search sucks. They got blindsided by open AI. They don't have to keep customers coming back with shiny features because they keep them coming back by killing off all the other options. I'm fine with the day that we hear RIP google.

Re: "Innovation" suggests

[LindleyF]

It's also that when you are trying to coordinate so many different efforts, and trying to make sure everyone involved gets recognized, and trying to avoid damaging your existing user base......all that adds a ton of process overhead. The actual idea generation and feature implementation work can bog down a lot.

Better self-driving trucks

[penguinoid]

Better self-driving trucks key to avoid becoming "the next road kill."

FFS, Really?

[kenh]

Google had some 8,000 engineers and product managers working on search, with about 1,000 involved in search quality.

Eight Thousand engineers and one thousand product managers working on search?

What in the holy hell can they all be doing?

That's insane.

Re: FFS, Really?

[kenh]

Sorry, that's a perfectly reasonable eight thousand engineers AND managers working on search QUALITY - my bad. /SMH

Clashed with?

[oh_my_080980980]

Dear Reuters, you meant to say supports the claims of the Justice Department. That's what "behemoths" do. They squash competition.

Raghavan's description of Google struggling to stay relevant clashed with the Justice Department's depiction of a behemoth that broke antitrust law to retain dominance of online search and some aspects of advertising, including paying an estimated $10 billion annually to smartphone makers and wireless carriers to be the default search engine on devices. Google's share of th

It's rare that I search outside of Wikipedia

[HalAtWork]

I have bookmarked the sites that I like, and sometimes I get external links from those. If I want information, I will get it from Wikipedia or local news sources I have bookmarked.

It's rare that I will search for anything, because when I do, I end up seeing AI generated websites which are 90% preamble and 10% copy/paste basic information.

The rest of the results are from Q&A sites where many people are just asking the same question with no real information.

I would enjoy finding personal web sites that do

Hey fam...

[rsilvergun]

this you [cnn.com]?

Everyone likes to say they should innovate

[quantum_cyborg]

And obviously that's desirable and how you maintain an advantage. But the real question is do they know how. A lot don't, history shows pretty much all large corporations don't, so it's just a buzzword to them.

8,000 engineers on search, with 1,000 on quality

[clambake]

.... and those have all been replaced with a single disabled pigeon.

I haven't found google search useful for anything in at least a year, maybe a few years. The few times I've tried recently searching up error codes for fairly straightforward bugs, I've gotten ZERO results. Zero! Since when does google serve zero results for anything, let alone multiple queries of a technical nature? Nowadays I just ask ChatGPT and I usually get exactly what I'm looking for.

If true, then why kill projects at X?

[WindBourne]

Pechai KILLED the projects at X. That was their innovation. In addition, I believe that they got rid of the 10% time for own development.