Taking a bite out of Google’s search dominance
Machines are getting better at answering questions. But what if you want to ask a human? As Google and Microsoft move towards artificial intelligence, Reddit backs the old-fashioned type.
Reddit wasn’t designed to answer questions. But according to the company’s chief operating officer, Jen Wong, that’s what millions of people are using it for. So, why not lean into it?
The website’s reputation as a repository of knowledge was hard-earned, but it was a byproduct of the trust built over two decades within hundreds of thousands of online communities, where questions are asked, answered, and debated – and the cream rises to the top.
“I think we acknowledge now that there’s really two use cases to Reddit,” Wong tells Mumbrella. “There’s the one that we always had, which is around community and belonging. These are your people. You want to check in with them every day. You’re discovering new interests. That’s half of our user base today.”
And then there’s the half who are seeking answers.
“The second use case is: ‘I have questions that I want answers to, and I want to access this trove of information on Reddit to understand what the range of opinions is’. Making that a stronger product experience unto itself is something that we’re working on.”
Bolstering Reddit’s search functionality is one of the company’s main focuses for the year ahead, as it leans into one of its strongest assets.
“Reddit has been trusted for a long time, and I think it is because it’s structured in a way that allows for high quality content to come to the fore,” Wong says, noting the “altruistic sharing of information” at the heart of Reddit comes from the “community construct” of the site.
Within community comes judgement, which helps with the quality of the information.
“The community structure allows Reddit to be on topic, relevant, and feel small, even though it’s big,” she says. “That’s really important, because every post and piece of content is judged by a community of peers first. It’s moderated by humans. So it keeps it relevant and civil and on topic.”
Then the voting mechanism comes into play, which Wong says “really allows you to filter the best quality content to the top. We have these mechanisms that are foundational to Reddit that really work for us, and I think that’s becoming more and more appreciated by people.”
The structure of Reddit has made it a major player in the online search game, even if the website’s own search function leaves a little to be desired. To this point, ‘Reddit’ is the seventh most-searched term in Google in Australia, fifth in the US, and in the top ten in the UK.
“It’s because people now are trying to intentionally navigate to us,” Wong says. “They’ll have a query, and append ‘Reddit’, because they’re just trying to get the quality answers that Reddit has. We’ve kind of become mainstream.”
One of Reddit’s key focuses in the short term, according to Wong, is approving its search functions so people don’t have to go via Google.
Jen Wong
“Really we want to be the best at searching Reddit,” Wong explains. “I think these things coexist: broad-based search where you have a broad query and you’re trying to get an answer and Google, for example, gets you to a post really well.
“What we want on Reddit is for people to be able to see that there are a breadth of conversations across different topics in different communities; to get the range of the conversations across different spaces in Reddit. And so we’re working on that.”
The timing is fortuitous. Google has dominated internet search since launching in 1998 with a nascent version of a search technology named Page Rank. Within two years it was sorting and ranking over a billion websites in ten languages, and with the launch of commercial play AdWords, the company figured out a way to monetise its offering, without diluting the purity of the information it offered up.
At least, this was the idea. Since that time, Google has added various features that have moved it further from the original goal of being a clean search engine for the internet.
News and shopping came in 2002, while the autocomplete function was introduced in 2004. The feature brought unintended bias to its results, leading the BBC to ask: “Is Google autocomplete evil?’ Wired showed an antisemitic trend in its autocomplete suggestions, leading Google’s vice president of news, Richard Gingras to declare in a Washington hearing in 2016: “As much as I would like to believe our algorithms will be perfect, I don’t believe they ever will be.”
Voice search, public service announcements, and “enhanced AdWords campaigns” followed, until the day in 2023 when generative AI appeared at the top of the results page in the form of “Instant Answers”.
Google still dominates search — according to its internal data, there are over 5 trillion Google searches each year — but it’s under serious attack.
Last month, Vidhya Srinivasan, vice president and general manager of Google’s ads and commerce, wrote about the expansion of its search function, noting the “rich and multimodal experiences” that various AI tools offer.
“With AI, we’re continuing to expand the types of questions that people can ask,” she wrote. “For example, with the launch of AI Overviews, the volume of commercial queries has increased.”
This is great for marketers, whom Srinivasan was addressing. Over the past year, Google has added AI-powered shopping, 3D spinning adverts, and a virtual shopping tool to allow users to try on dresses.
“These are already helping people shop what they see, get tailored recommendations and understand a product better before they buy or find it in-store — and there is much more to come.”
Google was under extreme pressure to evolve its search function. Microsoft launched its own AI-powered search in February 2023 via its Bing engine, using OpenAI’s generative search technology. At the time of launch, Microsoft’s corporate VP Yusuf Mehdi noted the evolution of internet search since the early days of Google.
“There are 10 billion search queries a day, but we estimate half of them go unanswered,” Mehdi wrote. “That’s because people are using search to do things it wasn’t originally designed to do. It’s great for finding a website, but for more complex questions or tasks too often it falls short.”
This month, Microsoft introduced ‘Copilot search’ into Bing, which a Microsoft Australia spokesperson tells Mumbrella will “bring the best of a traditional search engine and generative AI chat all in one.”
The spokesperson says the new AI-assisted search “gives helpful, clearly cited sources, plus rich and relevant data together with images and videos. Depending on the query, you’ll either get an easy-to-digest summary, a clear answer, or a smart layout of information.”
The idea, Microsoft says, is “you spend less time scrolling through results and more time discovering.” Copilot Search cites its sources prominently, “so you know exactly where the information came from”.
“In addition to the citations, we inline link the entire sentence or passage within the responses so you can easily navigate to those sources.”
Despite its human-based results, Reddit isn’t avoiding artificial intelligence in its bid to rival the search giants. The company is currently applying machine translation to allow English-language content to be useful around the world, in a bid to compete on a global level.
“Every language outside of English is an opportunity for another Reddit,” Wong says.
“We think about ‘global content’ as [being] universally appealing and interesting, like life questions, sports, media, fandom of shows and movies, machine translating into French and German and different languages to start building communities in other countries.”
Reddit will be recruiting moderator teams around the world to ensure the accuracy and relevance of the information, which will help with its overall search play. Machine learning will aid in the expansion of Reddit’s search function, but the robots won’t be providing the answers. That task is left to the humans.
“I think we’ve become very mainstream because you see what happened in search,” Wong says. “I think it’s a really significant opportunity for us.”
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