Gregory Ferenstein
8 HN mentions · mentioned in 6 months, 2013–2025
0:32 · 12K views · Jan 3, 2013
A short Charlie Rose interview clip of Eric Schmidt discussing Google's direction for search. It is remembered for his remark that returning more than one result is a bug.
Quoted, often critically, to argue that Google aims for a single answer and to compare it with ChatGPT-style answers.
8 comments from Hacker News
The OP is stating a truism that I agree with (true with all truisms). Google is your default search engine for any query where (you believe) Google offers the highest probability of delivering the intended content/ answer. So any product, in any vertical, that can respond to a query with greater utility than google - and condition it's userbase that that is the case - has the potential to supplant google for those queries. Great example is the drift of search traffic for flight travel on google to direct traffic to sites like kayak and expedia. (another example is the shift of people search). The challenge of competing against kayak-like companies that offer great products in specific verticals, will only grow. So if you believe search traffic will not naturally decline over time you are effectively arguing that google will be able to outperform the pace at which new products will be built that have kayak (flight search) / linkedin (people search) / coverhound (auto insurance search) - like potential. And I think Eric Schmidt would agree. this video
I really think people have missed the point of Google and this sort of change. They are about constraining and managing what you can think. Don't believe me? Hear it in Schmidt's own words: this video (30 sec clip) "When you use google, do you get more than one answer? Of course you do. Well, that's a bug. We have more bugs per second in the world because we should be able to give you the right answer just once. We should know what you meant you should look for information and we should give it exactly right and we should give it to you in your language and we should never be wrong." Google see themselves as custodians of truth. They know the truth, and it is their job to give it to you. Now you might wonder 'how do they know what they truth is'. For google there is no ambiguity, there are not multiple narratives or explanations. The truth is what they say the truth is.
The message is that you cannot verify what you are told, you just get what you're given. And what part you are given is an illusion that there are more results. Just trust Google.... what could go wrong? Let's not forget, that Eric Schmidt said that more than 1 result is a bug. this video This touches on the scope and hubris of Google and other companies that mediate reality for us. They think they have 'the truth', they know it and will give it to us, and if we refuse their truth, they will attempt to train us until we get it, in schools, the workplace, online, etc. It's also why they will become irrelevant. If there is nothing organic about their results because the algo filters thoughtcrime ideas out, people will continue to move away. Thank god. I personally use presearch and feel happier that the results are more natural. But nothing is perfect.
> And it will outright prohibit young people from getting information from non-permitted sources (of course, legacy sources are not affected - incidentally, they're probably more harmful than the prohibited sources). Verification is the stick, AI is the carrot. More than one answer is a bug - Eric Schmidt this video
This snippet from an old interview seems to be relevant: this video In words: Schmidt here is saying that Google returning lots of pages is a "bug" and the future of search is understanding what the user wants and providing a single best answer.