Product design question
How would you make Google search better?
- Product design
- Easy
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What this question tests
Product improvement sense for the single most mature product in the industry: can you find a real, current gap instead of reciting old known Search features.
How to approach it
- Identify the current landscape: Search now faces pressure from AI chat interfaces answering questions directly, changing what better even means for users.
- Identify a specific gap: results for nuanced, multi part questions still often require several searches and manual synthesis across multiple links.
- Prioritize improving synthesis for complex queries over cosmetic result page changes, since that is where user effort is highest today.
- Propose a feature: smarter query understanding that recognizes when a question needs multiple sources and presents a synthesized, sourced summary alongside traditional links, preserving user trust through visible citations.
- Address the trade off, synthesis features can reduce clicks to publisher sites, so balance direct answers with maintaining a healthy link ecosystem publishers depend on.
- Define success as task completion rate, meaning the user's underlying need is met, not just click through rate on a single result.
What a strong answer includes
- Addresses the actual current competitive context, AI answer engines, rather than proposing outdated ranking tweaks.
- Names the publisher ecosystem trade off explicitly, a nuance that shows real business awareness beyond user experience alone.
- Uses task completion, not click through rate, as the metric, reflecting what a modern search product should actually optimize for.
Common mistakes
- Proposing generic ranking algorithm tweaks with no acknowledgment of the current AI answer engine competitive landscape.
- Ignoring the publisher and web ecosystem trade off that comes with direct answer synthesis.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you protect publisher traffic while still giving users direct answers?
- How would you measure whether a synthesized answer was actually correct?
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Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop