The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Stein: AI expands overall search queries without hurting core Google Search
“And what we're finding is that AI is expansionary. And so there's actually just more and more questions being asked and curiosity that can be fulfilled now with AI. And so that's where you get the growth. And so all like the core Google search isn't really cha…”
Stein: Core SEO quality signals remain extremely valid for AI search
“There's these best practices that I think still do largely apply because it's gonna ultimately come down to an AI is doing research and finding information. And a lot of the core signals, is this a good piece of information for the question? They're still vali…”
Stein: Successful product formats quickly become primitives every app must adopt
“Facebook probably created the modern feed, but there's a feed for every single product, right? And there's a LinkedIn feed and there's a feed for DoorDash. You know, it's not like these things become core primitives quickly and formats. And then at the end of …”
Stein: The cult of lean causes teams to under-invest in technical breakthroughs
“There's kind of this cult of lean, scrappy, fast, throw away your product quickly, keep moving. And I think at some level it's true for internal conviction, but to build a product that works for a lot of people that is based on a techno technological breakthro…”
Stein: The biggest shift in Search is users asking long, complex questions
“That's the biggest shift we're seeing people asking real long, hard, complex questions.”
Stein: AI models increasingly do not require heavy fine-tuning for sophisticated outcomes
“I think it's gonna open up a lot of this democratization of accessing these models and building incredible things. Cause you don't even need to do a lot to get the most sophisticated outcomes. Increasingly. I don't think you need to do a lot of this heavy duty…”
Stein: Contorting an established core product to do something new fails
“Whenever you try to mix a core product, that's very cemented in someone's mind and physically looks a specific way. And you're trying to make contort it to do something new. It's usually a bad recipe.”
Stein: New product formats expand platforms rather than replacing core features
“In many ways, the AI version of Google and stories and reels, they're all kind of similar in that they're new formats in the world that people are expecting and wanting more of. And by adding them, It becomes complimentary, not replacement. And in both cases, …”
Stein: Product momentum compounds from daily improvements rather than single changes
“I think that a lot of times people ascribe, you know, a lot of momentum to a one time change or a single person, right? I find a lot of this is actually this compounding effect. And you think about just every month, Like ruthlessly improving the product or the…”
Stein: Google Shopping has 50B products updated 2B times hourly
“There's fifty billion products in the Google shopping graph, for instance, they're updated two billion times an hour by merchants with live prices, right? You have two and fifty million places in maps.”
Stein: Google AI executes query fan-out with dozens of background searches
“When our AI constructs a response it's actually trying to, it does something called query fan out. Where the model uses Google search as a tool to find, to do other querying. So maybe you're asking about specific shoes. It'll add and append all of these other …”
Robby Stein: Diminishing returns make adding 50 people useless on mature products
“And you get to these points of just diminishing marginal return in every system where it feels like you could put 50 people on this project. Like it's just not gonna dramatically move the needle. And so part of it is this bottoms up thing with your own team be…”
Stein: Conversational AI search cannot fit within core search UI
“It's gonna be really hard to build all of that within the construct of the core search experience.”
Stein: Next year of AI products will set user habits for years
“I think people believe, and I certainly believe that the next year or so of product is going to kind of establish how people use the next wave of products from, for many years.”
Stein: Google AI Mode focuses on information, not productivity or creativity
“We are less focused on, you know, creativity, productivity, like upload a spreadsheet and like output graphs for me. Like we're not focused on that. Like we're really focused on what people use Google for and making an AI for that so that you can come to Googl…”
Stein: Instagram Close Friends initially failed due to 'best friend' mistranslations
“There was this, there's a story in, in close friends at Instagram where It just totally failed at first on, on in, in a bunch of, just when we shipped it. And it turned out that we looked at the data and people were only adding one close friend to their list b…”
Stein: Instagram Close Friends succeeded once users added 20 to 30 people
“It was working really well for people who added 20 to 30 people to their list. Cause what would happen is you put 30 people on your list and then two of them would write back to you on DM. And now you have closed the loop and you feel connected to those people…”
Stein: Google launched Search Live conversational voice out of Labs
“Funny enough, we actually just launched search live actually out of labs this week. And so you can talk to search in a live AI setting, which is conversational voice, voice on when you're driving, you can just talk all the knowledge I talked about, what you ca…”
Stein: Google Lens visual searches grow year-over-year across billions of queries
“Google lens, one of the fastest growing products out there, it's growing. Year over year increase in visual searches, which is already like a massive scale. It's like billions and billions and billions of searching in that way.”
Stein: Users are bringing complex calculations and visual questions to Google Search
“What we found is that people Are asking these questions in Google, like they're trying to get this out of Google. And so if you can just have an AI that's powerful enough to answer a really hard calculation, someone's trying to figure out or like take a pictur…”
Stein: Users typed 'AI' at end of Google queries to trigger answers
“We actually saw people in the query stream. Putting the words AI at the end of their queries because they're trying to like get the AI to like do the thing.”
Stein: Snapchat initially did not permit photo uploads from camera roll
“Snapchat at the time didn't allow you to upload photos. It was like, you have to use a snap camera.”
Stein: Instagram sharing shifted from public feeds to Stories and DMs
“You know, certainly in Instagram, there's been a big shift over the years of sharing into public, very large broadcast posts and feed into these more lightweight formats, like stories and DM, actually private sharing as well.”
Stein: New product growth engines yield 10% to 20% wins per optimization
“And then when you land a new thing that creates this new little growth engine And then you put people on it and you optimize it because you get, you're getting big, like each change is like 10% win, 20% win, four percent win. And it's clearly like still has so…”
Stein: Google originally built AI Mode with 5 to 10 people
“I mean, this was probably like five to 10 people worth of people originally.”
Stein: Friends won't use a product past 30 days out of loyalty
“I've, I found out very quickly building startups that if you put 20 friends on something, they're not gonna do you that many favors. Like they're not gonna use a product every single day. Cause they're your friend, like 30 days in, 60 days in, 90 days in. They…”
Stein: Google is rolling out multi-turn visual search in AI Mode
“There's a visual version of AI mode that basically we talked about for at IO. And so you can reference some of those keynotes, but that that's in the process of being rolled out. And so you're going to be able to now ask like, you know, what's a mid century, m…”