Google execs admit users are ‘not quite happy’ with search experience after Reddit blackouts

Google users have long been able to append their search queries with the term “Reddit” to find helpful resources on specific topics.

When thousands of Reddit forums went dark earlier this month, that tactic lost its effectiveness. Many pages in search results were suddenly inaccessible or unhelpful, because moderators of some of the most popular forums turned their pages to private as part of a widespread protest of Reddit’s decision to start charging developers for access to its data.

It’s an issue that Google executives say is at least partially resolved by a new feature called Perspectives that was unveiled on Monday. The Perspectives tab, available now on mobile web and the Google app in the U.S., promises to surface discussion forums and videos from social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Reddit and Quora.

At an all-hands meeting earlier this month, Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president in charge of search, told employees that the company was working on ways for search to display helpful resources in results without requiring users to add “Reddit” to their searches. Raghavan acknowledged that users had grown frustrated with the experience.

“Many of you may wonder how we have a search team that’s iterating and building all this new stuff and yet somehow, users are still not quite happy,” Raghavan said. “We need to make users happy.”

Raghavan was responding to an employee comment about negative user feedback because of too many ads and irrelevant results. “What can we do to improve the user experience on the core product that made Google a household name?” the employee asked, according to audio of the meeting obtained by CNBC.

Google is in the process of trying to revamp search to keep pace with rivals in taking advantage of the latest…