Big Technology Podcast - Meet The Man Who Runs Google Search — With Prabhakar Raghavan

Episode Date: September 28, 2022

Prabhakar Raghavan is the Google senior vice president who oversees Search, Maps, Ads, Commerce, Payments, and Google Assistant. He joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss the evolution of these products, how they're integrating cutting-edge artificial intelligence, and why he's steering Google tech products toward more human-style interactions with users. Raghavan joins fresh off an appearance at Google's Search On launch event and breaks down the new features announced Wednesday.

LinkedIn Presents. Welcome to the big technology podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We are joined today by a really special guest, he runs, and let me know if you can give anything else inside Google that is not under his umbrella, but search ads, commerce, maps, payments, and Google Assistant. I'm talking about none other than Brabacher Raghavan, Google's senior vice president for all of the above. Rabakar, welcome to the show.

Hey, Alex. Thanks for having me on your show, and it's a super exciting time with our search-on event, with so much to share. I'd love to share more about it today. Also, I hope we hear some details that you have from presented. today. Just for listeners edification, we're getting Prabaka right, basically hot off stage at Search On, which is just taking place. And then this pod goes basically as the folks get off stage. So it's a big event that Google uses to talk about search. So over the next 45 minutes

or so, we're going to talk about, you know, is there actually any innovation in search? What's happening with maps? And then some of the themes that we like to talk about more. on the show, broader market outcomes and, you know, maybe we get some hints about where everything else is going because Prabhakar has so much visibility into a lot of the world's in tech. So let's talk about search to start. Okay. That sounds good.

Great. Okay. So you just did a search event. And the natural question that I ask is, why are we doing an event for search? Because, you know, search, of course, there's been innovation in search. Maybe the algorithms get better. But at the end of the day, the way that we're searching today is very similar to the way that we started when Larry and Sergey founded Google where you write what you need to find into a search bar and then you get these links. Okay, maybe a little bit more information.

But the biggest innovation I heard about search is now that people are searching on TikTok when they're trying to find stuff. So from your vantage point, where is the motion? Where is the movement in search right now? I think the biggest motion, I'm glad you've appealed to our founders to begin with. they laid down the mission to make information universally accessible and useful. But the way we pursued that mission has been exactly like you said. We've kept users in a box, it's a text box, and we've conditioned users over the last two decades to express themselves really precisely.

And when they do, we get them the perfect answer. The world has moved on in a couple of respects. Number one, increasingly there's user intent. that don't have this single right end so that has to go on top. So that's one way things have changed. Can you give an example of that before we move on to the more fundamental issue?

Let me give you two examples since you ask for one. The first is if you ask the query yellow dress, your intent is to find yellow dresses. There isn't the world's best yellow dress followed by the second best yellow dress and so on. What we should be offering you is a palette of choices

and then iteratively adapting to your taste. This means we're going to have much more visually rich, immersive experiences where you browse through a large number of results. It's no longer about what we used to call precision at one, which is, you know, you have to nail the right answer on top. So that's one example. Second example, dinner seating arrangements at a wedding. There is no right answer for that.

But there's a plethora of opinions and a lot of good information out there from people's, so a lot of knowledge in people's heads. that is captured in discussions, forums, et cetera. And we need to do a much better job and have been improving our focus on elevating the highest quality of that content. So that's two examples of going beyond, you know, the single right answer. Yeah, it's surprising to me that you want people to spend more time in search. Typically, like the idea was get them to the most relevant website right away. Is that no longer the case?

You know, the examples I gave you aren't particularly about keeping them on or off. if it's wedding seating arrangements you're off to finding the best ideas but you will go back and forth so it's not about time spent right but let me get to the second I think deeper point underlying your first question

which is over the last two decades we've trained users to that if they express their query perfectly we'll nail the answer but that's a box we have to get out of and over the last two decades network and storage costs have come down,

which has the implication that it's easier than ever to create and disseminate rich content, whether it's videos, images, etc. What that means is people should be able to express their interests much more multimodally and get responses that are much more multimodal. One immediate consequence, or consequence we've developed with the last few years technically,

but this is what you'll hear a lot about from our search on announcements which you've just heard. The camera is your new keyboard. The camera is a new keyboard, meaning, instead of forcing the user to type the intent in a particular way,

you can just hold up your camera and capture this, express this intent that is so hard to put into words. And with that, you're off to the races. Being able to append to that text, voice, et cetera, you can express yourself much more richly. And that's what we're after. How does that work when you're searching?

So just thinking about the natural way of doing things, I like never will like point a camera at something and be like, you know, this is usually my, if I'm at, if I'm using a camera, I'm at my destination. Search I use as a point of trying to figure out, you know, I'm at the earlier stages of discovery. Yeah. So you're walking along the street, right? Let me give you two examples.

You're just out there in the street, right? You walk by a store. Normally, you window shop, now you can point your camera and summon up exactly the thing that you see in the window and say, oh, that's what that is, right? Learn more about it, right? So that's one use case. The second use case, which you just also announced at Search-on,

imagine holding up that camera in a busy street in Tokyo and saying, I'm looking for a coffee shop that's not too busy right now. That is the capability we're bringing with the live view and maps, right? So the camera now becomes an input modality that is far more powerful than your destination. It's already been underway, Alex, for the last, I would say, five years, with lens usage having grown to over 8 billion queries a month with us, right? So it's not a new. How does that compare to type queries?

So 8 billion queries on Google Lens? It's still small, but growing, yeah. It's, yeah, but growing many fold faster, right? So the point is, especially with younger users, these new modalities are the ones that are taking off because these are users who weren't trying to search the old-fashioned way, like you and I. Yeah. Yeah, I'm definitely in the old-fashioned search way.

So you'll excuse me if my bias is to the old way. It does take me some time to figure out the new way. But let's go back. Let's keep on this line of thinking. So talking about, you know, discovery versus you're already there. Okay, now we're into maps, right? It doesn't seem to me like when you're searching a map. So maps are obviously a big part of Google search now,

even though people might think of it as a map program. It's a search program. But when I'm trying to find a coffee shop, if I type in coffee shop, I can see all the little red, you know, what do you call them? Pointers, placers. with the coffee shops, the star rating, that's pretty efficient. And in one view, I'm already basically looking at my options. Yeah.

When I, and I, you know, Google's been talking about, use the camera to search, you know, use lens. Eight billion is not, eight billion series of queries a day. Not bad. Yeah. How long, how often is it? Eight billion a month. A month.

Not bad. But I think with most users, especially we're talking most of the globe, not on fast internet speeds, not on fast phones. So it ends up being this much clunky experience where, you know, I could have typed, it takes me maybe, you know, five to 10 seconds to query something on maps as it is today. If I want to load the camera, then try to get it connected, have these, you know, augmented reality features catch, that takes so much more time. So I understand that Google, you know, is taking advantage of the fact that we have higher processing speeds, you know, more data, all that stuff.

But when the rubber meets the roads, I wonder if that's, you know, what's actually happening for the average user. Let me give you a couple of data points, two data points to sort of set that straight, right? Yeah, crush me on this one. Yeah. In many locales with new internet users, right? Text is not the dominant form of interaction, right? In India, one and three queries is voice already, okay?

which means we have to get the audio, voice rack, and regurgitate results. So people have already moved beyond text in those locales. That's because of what we started with. These are users who were never trained to do the traditional Google to two keyword search. Number one. Number two, I'd argue that the comment about, you know, networks are slow and so on. Yeah. It was true maybe five to ten years ago, but in a lot of the newer markets that kind of skipped a generation of telecoms, they've gone to such high speed Internet, like if you've seen what Reliance has done in India and Africa and so on.

So I don't think it's bandwidth is no longer a constraint. This is the point I was making. Networking has gotten cheaper, faster than competition. So competition is really still the thing that holds this. And that's why you see us and others putting more competition on the phone. So this overhead that you're thinking of like, well, I have to fire up a camera, insert IR, you know, the kit. All of that is pretty instantaneous right now, even on what you would consider a low-end phone in an emerging market. Last thing allowed is, remember, we're talking about users.

I said they're not used to the traditional Google search. They also have never seen a paper map. So why would you make them look at a paper map and search one? And you can just hold this thing up. It's almost like you're looking at the world naturally and intuitively and make it work the way we think as humans. So let me take one more swing at standing up and making the case for the paper map. And all right, so here it is.

The paper map allows me to search four, five, six, seven, ten blocks away. Yeah. You know, maybe a half mile if I'm thinking about walking. the augmented reality, point your phone somewhere, you know, it's generally like what's, you have a really hard time building a UI where you can see what, you know, I'm at a coffee shop that's four and a half stars, but if I were to walk 10 minutes, I'm going to get to the 4.9 star. And with a paper map, that's easy to see. With the augmented reality stuff, not so much. So how do you respond to that piece of advocacy I'm doing for the old school style?

So let me give you a response. that's actually built into our AR directions product, right? If you come out of the subway in London, Tokyo, New York even, where you are, right? My biggest challenge visiting these places is I am headed for that restaurant 10 blocks from the subway station. I don't know which way to go. I hold up the phone, and it shows me the first step, go this way first, and that. So it's not like it has to be direct line of sight for me. but the 10 block away restaurant is represented to me

in a different way than the paper map, right? And I understand that if you've grown up with a paper map, it might be somewhat intuitive, but it's almost as easy to hold this thing up and say, well, start by going up there and then we'll tell you what's next, right? So it is a different, you're right, that it's a different UI.

You're right, it takes more imaginative work from a design perspective. I'm not convinced that from a cognitive load in the user, it's worse. I actually think people get acclimatized to it pretty much. All right. Let's talk about form then. Because when I hear your talk about, hey, Google instead of necessarily being, you know, 2D is really overlaid over the 3D world, I think to myself immediately,

how does Google move to its next iteration without being an augmented reality company? And it's interesting because you have Snap. clearly an augmented reality company that's what they say on their branding meta. It used to be Facebook. Now it's metaverse. That includes AR. We have Apple. We know Apple is working on these AR

glasses. Are they ever going to ship them? That's another question. Maybe you have some intel on that. We can ask you about that. Google's tried, right? We know Google Glass has tried and failed, but it seems to me like it would be in Google's interest to take another very big swing very soon.

What do you think about that? So you began by saying these are all augmented reality companies. I think our first and foremost objective is to be an information company to do whatever it takes to get the user and facilitate their interaction with user as well as possible. If that in the current technology requires augmented reality, great, we're starting with the phone. And as headsets move from being clunky, you know, one pound things that hang off your face to something more usable, right? The nice thing about glass, Alex, if you remember,

it didn't feel like an appendage, right? It was just there. Maybe. Well, maybe you say, but, right? In comparison with some of the things you're seeing on, right? But necessarily that limited the amount of compute and even networking that was available from those devices. As miniaturization proceeds,

we're going to see those strengths get to the point where these appended devices are actually much more lightweight and usable. And we're all in, you know, looking at that hard. That doesn't make us an AR company. We will at the core remain an information company. Okay. So you're going to, I mean, you've already previewed these glasses. How important of initiative are they inside Google?

AR glasses. You know, look, we're conducting research in a lot of areas. Let me put another way. Do you want maps in search to be an application on, let's say, Apple's device, or do you want it to be something contained within a Google ecosystem? Because you did do Android, right? Android, the mobile operating system has paid off really well for Google. And the native Gmail, the native Android, I mean, the native maps, the native assistant,

you know, some of these products very core to your portfolio benefit a lot from having the big app and the operating system. When it comes to augmented reality, do you want that type of thing? Are you content being an app on, let's say, the Apple Glasses? Well, I'll note that all of the apps you mentioned, including Gmail and search and maps, function, I hope you'll agree well on iOS. So it's the goal of any app that attempts to serve all users should be platform agnostic and serve iOS users as well as Android users, the intent is not to say, okay, we're going to do better on the one platform of the other. So you'll see us continue to do, you know, do our best to be, to function as well

on any platform. Okay. I see what you're doing. There's, you know, some thought, but you can't give away the whole augmented reality roadmap in one conversation. But there's a reason why Google did Android, right? Of course, it's fine to operate. on the iPhone. But, you know, there's something to be said for having your own operating system. Some of your competitors, meta, for instance, is finding that out the hard way. You'd agree, right? I'm not commenting on what meta strategies.

I wouldn't profess to know what they want to do. But for Google, there's a reason why you have an operating system. I think to the extent it facilitates delivering the best end-to-end experience. That is the ultimate goal, right? if we can actually make it work really well for the user, great. And it goes back to ultimately, we are an information company, and that's what we want to service, right? It's not like we have to be an operating system company or an AR company.

We are an information company, and that's our bread and butter that we hope to keep doing really well. Interesting. You know, when we talk about, it seems like I'm hearing a theme here, right? When you talk about the way that people are going to search, the way people might use maps, is that they're interacting with search in a more human-type-focused way, right? We call it natural and intuitive. Yeah, exactly.

Okay. Or, yeah, same idea, right? You're, instead of typing in, you know, one or two words, you actually maybe type in a sentence. Instead of looking on a paper map, you show maps the world around you, and then it helps you make sense of it. On that note, I'm curious what you think about and the innovations that we're seeing with Lambda. You know, Lambda's a favorite topic on this show. We have Blake. Sorry, here.

Now, that is a bit of a leap, but it's... I'm not asking you any Senient's questions because I know you don't believe it's sentient. But the idea that a chatbot like Landa could end up being, you know, maybe not a person, but the way that you start interacting with Google Search, search that knows you, search that can help you as a friend might. That's pretty interesting. So obviously we've heard a lot about Google assistants,

the product that you oversee, does Google become more chat-based? Or even more, you mentioned that one-third of users in India query with voice, you know, does Google become like super smart clipy down the road where you have just a conversation? with it. You know, I love the way you're leading up to it. The notion of a super smart clip I'm not so sure about. You know what I'm saying?

Like back and forth as opposed to, that knows you, that understands your life. Yeah. Look. Your context. You're absolutely right that having an assistant that understands you and using that understanding to condition your experience is a super interesting. an idea, right? But if you look at the current state of large language models, there are at least two difficult challenges to overcome, right? The first we've seen before in a number of earlier

times, which we call safety, right? How do you know that the bot, the language model, doesn't drift into territory that's toxic, potentially racist, harms the user, etc? And it's a very subtle question because harm doesn't just come from one utterance, right? And so this is a deep question for us as computer scientists together with the colleagues and the social sciences to try and understand, right? And we don't have enough understanding, I would say. So that safety is one thing, right? And we have to get this right. The second part is what we call factuality. you know, we are relied upon billions of times a day to make sure that we stick to the facts as far as we can, right? Now, it's known that large language models can sometimes hallucinate without necessarily giving any clue that they are hallucinating.

So if you came in and asked, what's the height of the Eiffel Tower? Today we give you the answer. Now, let's say a large language model said Alex, the height of the Eiffel Tower is three feet, six inches. Right. Now, if you didn't know better, how could you check the factuality? So, in other words, that problem of using a large language model to answer factual questions and ensuring the veracity is a hard one. So these are the two really hard challenges we'll have to overcome before anything of this sort can be productized. That makes sense. So it might be a way down the road.

Yes. What did you think when one of your colleagues said that your technology was a person? you know, I'm thinking, first of all, I see no reason to believe that, right? And again, as a computer scientist, I go back to Turing's original test, which is can you put a machine and a human behind a screen and fool the person on the other side without them knowing which one is which, right? And in many straightforward interactions, like, you know, the height of the Eiffel Tower, you could probably fool them, right?

but I would say we don't even have a full understanding of what that question means, you know, the S word, the sentient word, right? We've got a few years from resolving that, right? But if you ask me today, I would say there's no basis for believing that there is sentience in a language model. Right, but also as a researcher coming from a research background, Google doesn't hire dumb people, right? So we know that's... Try your best.

Many of your colleagues, I can confirm that. So just knowing that it actually convinced someone that it was a person, if I'm coming from a research background, my reaction might have just been like, damn, our stuff is good. You had some of that? Definitely, but remember that, you know, I started with arguably a simpler problem,

which is the Turing test. And today, that's not been convincingly passed. You can pass it in slivers, right? But it's not like anybody's claiming AGI, artificial general intelligence to the point where you can do an end-to-inturing test. And the questions you're now asking, I think, are an even further step beyond, which is why I think it's going to be some years before we can resolve that. I can understand a viewpoint that is, well, we've shown facets of intelligence or sentience.

I cannot make an definitive assertion that would be built as intelligent or sentient. I don't think so. Yeah, I don't, I don't think you, you know, I guess that's not what I'm getting at. But I kind of think that the interesting and the cool thing is the advance, you know, because we know the chatbots, I'd try to change a flight through a chat bot, you throw your phone out the window. Maybe good for Android's business, but not very good for AI. That's actually an astute observation, right, which is the progress and the, you know, the flashes of brilliance these models show are actually astounding, right? I was a junior researcher at IBM when they did deep blue that big chess, you know, Casparo or chess, right? At that time, I remember, okay, chess, sure, go, never, not in my lifetime.

It's completely wrong, right? It took about 20 years from then to get to go and deep mind, right? But along the way, I heard about the famous protein-solving problem. And I'm like, okay, we have no clue how to solve the N-body problem in protein folding. We're never going to do this, right? And guess what? Now they do alpha-for. So in each of these cases,

I think there's astounding advances far beyond what we predicted. And the same is true of language understanding as well in these language models. Right. Prabhakar Raghavan is with us. He's the Google SDP in charge of search, ads, commerce, maps, payments, Google assistant. What's left to Google? I don't know. We've talked about a bunch.

We've talked about search. We've talked about maps. A little bit about assistant. When we come back after this, we're going to talk about the state. of the market, and then we're going to get to a little bit more of the products that Robbock are overseas. Back right after this. Hey, everyone. Let me tell you about The Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than

two million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news. Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily show, where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines. In 15, 15 minutes or less, and explain why you should care about them. So, search for The Hustled Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like the one you're using right now. And we're back on the second half, a big technology podcast. We're joined by Prabhakar, Raghavan. Google's senior vice president for search ads, commerce, maps, payments, and Google assistant.

When you're in the elevator, do you try to someone to someone say, hey, what do you do at Google? You can't list all those by the time the floor rang. right? I say I'm a scientist working at Google. Yeah, that's much better, much better. Because then you start to end up in a conversation like this one. And once in a while, I imagine those are fun, but not all the time. It's fun, Alex.

Fun for me too. A week ago, I wrote about some of the pullback happening, especially when it comes to big tech spending. Sundar, your CEO, has talked about being trying to be 20. 8% more efficient. We've heard conversations coming out of meetings where people are asking about perks and he's having to double down on the fact that like, listen, the cool thing about being at Google is you have to work on new projects, not that you, you know, I don't know, I guess use the most cliche example, play ping pong or go down a slide.

By the way, there's people, you know, from this floor going down on slides right now as we speak. That's good to know. I'm glad we can at least confirm slide health as excellent at Google. Vegas. It's nice that people are back in the office. So, you know, I imagine that your projects, especially search, right, your products, search maps, ads. These are a type of things that are core that are going to get, you know, lots of investment. The thing that I wonder about is what happens to those, you know, weird projects, things that used to be common at Google, maybe still are, in some ways like Gmail kind of builds on the side. You know, are they still going to get funding in a time

where, you know, there's a response to the market. I'm just going to read you the headline of my story last week. I'm curious if you think what you think. So the headline is big tech enters a new era of scaled back ambitions as the stock market contracts. Is that fair or do you dispute that? I cannot speak for big tech, whoever that is, but I can speak for Google. Yeah, let's do that. I don't think we should be scaling back any ambition, right?

At our core, there are two things, I believe we've always done well. Number one, move the technological needle, independent of non-need. Like, if you see us stamping out large language models every year, it's not because we know that, okay, this next language model is going to do this exact thing in search and so on, right? There was Bert, there's Mum, Lambda, Palm, and you've seen that sequence, right? I expect that progress to continue unabated, and it'll run a little ahead of product reality. The second thing, you know, having worked with many research labs and then come here, right, Google is pretty speedy in moving this stuff into product, right?

So the birth motion into product, for instance, is pretty much over. Mom is having a pretty healthy run now. And all of these, if you count the years. What's that? Mom is, she's multimodal user model. something like that, right? Sorry. I mean, I just think of it as mom. Yeah.

Good, but it's a large model that combines text, images, videos, and across many languages. That's mom. And that is now starting to make its way into products, right? And how is it happening? Yeah. It's showing up, for instance, in some of the search on announcements we just did around review content, right, and enhancing the fidelity of those. So that motion is taken about two years, okay?

And we need to keep priming the supply of amazing advanced technology, new language models, new lens technology, and so on, to keep the products vigorous, vibrant, and the best we can for our users. So I expect that to continue innovated. I don't think we should scale back ambitions in any way, right? You use the word, if I recall, weird, Alex. It's one of my favorite words on the show.

Okay. You know, I don't know what counts is weird. The way I might interpret that, and you tell me if this makes sense, is anything, any technology that doesn't have a known purpose of path to market. And if you take that, I would assert that not really are you hearing about it, you know, at I.O. here and beyond at our research conferences, I fully anticipate you'll hear more advances in the time to come, right? When I see some of the early work coming out of research and DeepMind,

I'm super excited about what is coming up. Do you have any good examples that you can share? I think my colleagues in research and deep mind should be the ones to share that. It's their babies. Okay. So what you're seeing is not public versus... A lot of this is not public, and I expect. them to keep priming the pump.

Yeah, because I mean, I do remember when I was doing research for my book talking about, you know, the large bets that just really had no immediate payoff, things like natural language processing research that Google was doing, that eventually made its way into the assistant. And if we do end up moving to this more conversational interface with technology versus the, you know, taps and types like that I like, that stuff, that stuff is really important. exactly so important and you know we cannot have a hiatus in that so how do you then become I mean are you are yeah how do you then become more efficient without risking cutting that and I'll just go one step deeper how do you keep the people that are most eager to work on the stuff that doesn't have immediate results if everything that's going on in the company the rhetoric from the top, the market is saying profit now. I don't recall us saying profit now, but I think...

The two things you asked, how do you get more efficient and how do you keep the best talent? I actually have the same answer curiously. Okay. And the reason is when I talk to some of our best people, the biggest complaint I get is what they call bureaucracy. I mean, bureaucracy is a big word, right? but it's too many layers of decision-making. They want to move fast, and sometimes like,

well, I have to ask this person and check Joe over there and Mary over here and blah, blah, blah, right? And I think there's necessary gains to be had to cut through some of that. We've become a large company, and we can definitely harvest some of the deficiency simply by making streamlining a lot of decision processes.

and Sundar certainly was pointing at that and kicked off a bunch of internal sprints to actually try and clean that up. How's that going? Well, the great thing is Googlers care, right? We got thousands of ideas from, you know, Googlers, and here's something that's staring you in the face. Please do it, right?

And we're triaging that and getting through that. I definitely anticipate. we'll get a lot of that. Now, to your second part of your question, if we are successful at cleaning up this craft, then it will be the case that the most talented employees will be the ones who will want to remain and not be daunted by the bureaucracy they perceive. Do you think Google's moving slower today than when you join? you know it's very hard to say it's i've been here a little over 10 years and uh the the two things that survive right a number one continuing to explore ideas uh research that seem far ahead of their time and you know i gave you examples even of how i myself have been surprised by the speed at which some of this has emerged and actually moving that stuff and

into applications, right? Because if you thought about reinforcement learning and some of that stuff, right, yeah, it was good to when go, when it go. But then you start to see this amazing application like protein folding that comes out of some of that, right? It is mind-blowing in the impact it can still have a head. Can you unpack that for a minute? Winning at Go?

So a lot of people know that deep minds technology is able to win And it's very difficult board game AlphaGo. And that technology was used to unpack proteins. So the protein folding problem basically says, here's a molecule. It's a very big molecule. It's typically an organic molecule that's sitting somewhere in our bodies, right? What is the three-dimensional shape it falls into? Because that is key to drug discovery and, you know, triaging and understanding disease vectors.

and solving that classically using methods from physics and numerical computation was solving something called an end body problem which we really didn't know how to do at scale and somewhat stunningly some of the same insights in machine learning advances that help beat humans in the game of go could now be repurposed from alpha go to alpha fold to fold proteins and now hundreds of thousands of proteins have now been successfully folded, which is like a quantum leap, right? And we put that out for availability to researchers, life sciences researchers world over. And I was recently at a conference where they said every major lab in understanding diseases and finding cures is making some use of alpha and that is a very proud moment for us. And so the point I'm making is we want to continue pushing the frontiers because there's almost an inevitability to the applications that follow, right? And that's what, I think, that spirit persists at Google from 10 years ago. And I don't think we're going to lose that any time soon.

I think we're still very committed to those kinds of advances. Okay. Interesting answer to the moving slower question. But we'll take it. I got to ask you about ads. Okay. There's an advertising slowdown going on right now. as the economy gets tougher, people have started to, you know, slow down their ad spend. And especially on digital advertising, where you can shut it off immediately, that's where we're starting to see the biggest problems.

We're seeing action from the Federal Reserve that leads us to believe that, you know, we're going to go into a deeper hole in the economy right now. As someone who's working on that product and sits on top of ads at Google, how do you feel about all this and is the slowdown as bad as people are saying? So, first of all, there's one thing I've learned about microeconomics is it's uncertain, right? It's always uncertain. And some of the easy lines and connections you draw don't necessarily pan out exactly as expected. So for first example, like when, what is it now, two and a half years ago, COVID hit,

immediate conclusion, not us, me, Google, but the world over, was, oh, my God, the world economy is going to grind to a heart, right? And then you saw these pictures of ships, stranded in ports, and so on, right? Yeah. Senators selling their stock portfolios. So I hear. I haven't followed the senators closely, right? So that didn't quite play out with the way we anticipate. right? The economy didn't collapse immediately, right? So the thing I'd say is, from our perspective,

if we can be continue to be really good at providing value to advertisers, measurably so, right, while preserving user quality, that's the best thing we can do, whether in a great economy or whatever this is turning into, this uncertainty. And so I, I, I, I don't try and draw a line from what the Fed is doing to what our products have to do. Our products always have to be best of breed. And that's it. And at Google, like, as much as you can say, like, does this slowdown feel real and prolonged? Or you think it's overblown?

I, you know, now you're turning me into a macroeconomics PhD, which I totally am not. So you're asking me to read the future, and I don't think I'm going to try to read the future. Okay, that sounds good. One of your competitors, Apple, is blocking, tracking, in iOS or enabling users to block track in language that strongly suggests they should block it. What do you think about that? Is that a good step for privacy, or is that, you know, something that you'd rather not deal with that? My understanding is it's hitting some Google products as well. Is that a good example for the rest of the economy?

Or what do you think about that? So let me unpack a couple of layers of that. So first of all, I think the objective of protecting user privacy and trust is absolutely the right one, whether for them, us, for the whole industry, right? I'm not of the belief that privacy and advertising are at odds with each other. I think it's quite feasible to deliver high quality advertising while preserving user privacy. But it does take a couple of things. One, the best way to provide the trust is transparency and control to users, right?

Transparency in what is done with their data and control with what they allow and disallow. The next thing, you know, I spoke of how privacy and advertising are not at odds with each other, I think you're familiar with the privacy sandbox, which has been our proposed approach to avoid tracking individual users across the web. We are obviously in tests. We're working closely with partners, and so far things are going reasonably well. The idea is to take a bunch of users who are in a cohort and treat them as one. So within that cohort, a user is anonymous. And say this person is a food official ad or we'll show them food ads or whatever, right?

The important thing, Alex, is to ensure we don't lose sight of what it takes to really provide privacy and trust. Because if you put up some pop-ups and say, well, we shouldn't track you, et cetera. But then people still feel like something weird is happening, then that deeply undercuts trust. So the example I'll give you with my wife searched for Rumba vacuum cleaners. and then for the next few days whenever it's at home I got ads for Roomb Vacuum Cleaners and

the only way conceivable way that could happen is if somebody was fingerprinting a device in the house right now that is a pretty bad practice we do not tolerate it we do not use

fingerprinting for ad targeting or measurement and you need to shut down those things And that's a much deeper technical issue and ecosystem issue than some, you know, simpler solution like, hey, people shouldn't track, right? And we're working on solutions, but that's what it'll take to garner user trust for privacy safe advertising. Did you buy the Roomba? Yeah, we did buy the Roomba. Yeah, I got one on Amazon Prime data this year.

And I will admit, I'm a Roomba haul. I just send that thing every day. Yeah, practically every day. It is cool. And the fact that Apple's making those changes and doubling its ad stuff, is that like quick get your antennas up? I mean, Apple should do what Apple should do. I think I go back to how do we deliver privacy safe advertising

in a way that our users will trust us and do everything to raise their trust, including looking at some of these surreptitious attack vectors that are out there. Are you satisfied with where Google is? And do you think users genuinely trust Google? Yeah, my answer to that is we always should do better, right? You know, nothing short of 100% trust is good enough. So when you say, are you satisfied? That's the bar I hold my team to.

And do you think people trust Google? I believe people trust Google for a lot of things. The quality of our information is unmatched, and our user studies show a lot of trust. All right, we have like 60 seconds left. What are you optimistic about? What are you most optimistic about? I have to go back to the technology that's brewing

across the community, the computer science community. I don't be particular about just Google, but a lot of it at Google. And the tremendous potential it has for uplifting human lives, because I really think information is empowering in a way that very few things are. And the fact that even though we've been at this for close to 25 years, there is so much more we can do. And I concede, Alex, that you like the paper map better or paper-like map better.

But there are so many new Internet users out there. young people, people coming online for the first time, we're looking for entirely new experiences. And technology can facilitate those now. I think that's tremendously exciting. Yeah. And look, at the end of this conversation, I'll say I'm willing to try out the non-paper map.

And I hope it's on glasses one day. Prabhakar, thank you for joining. This is super fun for me too. Thanks, Alex. This was super fun for me too. Yeah. You should do it again sometime soon. Take care.

All right. See you later. Bye. And that'll do it for us here on Big Technology. podcast. Thank you, Rebecca, for joining. Always good to have someone making the decisions inside these big tech companies, giving us some of their time, helping us think about the way that they make decisions. Thanks to all of you for listening. Thank you, Nate Guatney, for doing the editing. Thank you, LinkedIn, for having me as part of your podcast network. We will see you next week.

We're my interview with Francis Hogan, a person who brought forward all these revelations about Facebook in the Wall Street Journal last year. That conversation, which took place at Unfinished Live, and New York City is going to go live. It was really fun. I'm excited to bring it to you on the feed, and we have another special guest coming. All right. So if this is your first time listening, please hit subscribe. If you're a long time listener and enjoying the show, five-star ratings on Apple or Spotify go a long way,

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