The man who killed Google Search?

where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning

This better echoes my personal experience with the decline of Google search than TFA: it seems to be connected to the increasing use of ML in that the more of it Google put in, the worse the results I got were.

Machine learning or not, seo spam sort of killed search. It’s more or less impossible to find real sites by interesting humans these days. Almost all results are Reddit, YouTube, content marketing, or seo spam. And google’s failure here killed the old school blogosphere (medium and substack only slightly count), personal websites, and forums

Same is happening to YouTube as well. Feels like it’s nothing but promoters pushing content to gain followers to sell ads or other stuff because nobody else’s videos ever surface. Just a million people gaming the algorithm and the only winners are the people who devote the most time to it. And by the way, would I like to sign up for their patreon and maybe one of their online courses?

Thanks for writing this insightful piece.

The pathologies of big companies that fail to break themselves up into smaller non-siloed entities like Virgin Group does. Maintaining the successful growing startup ways and fighting against politics, bureaucracy, fiefdoms, and burgeoning codebases is difficult but is a better way than chasing short-term profits, massive codebases, institutional inertia, dealing with corporate bullshit that gets in the way of the customer experience and pushes out solid technical ICs and leaders.

I'm surprised there aren't more people on here who decide "F-it, MAANG megacorps are too risky and backwards not representative of their roots" and form worker-owned co-ops to do what MAANGs are doing, only better, and with long-term business sustainability, long tenure, employee perks like the startup days, and positive civil culture as their central mission.

There is a semi-famous internal document he wrote where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning, or at least contain it as much as possible, so that ranking stays debuggable and understandable by human search engineers.

There's a lot of ML hate here, and I simply don't see the alternative.

To rank documents, you need to score them. Google uses hundreds of scoring factors (I've seen the number 200 thrown about, but it doesn't really matter if it's 5 or 1000.) The point is you need to sum these weights up into a single number to find out if a result should be above or below another result.

So, if:

  - document A is 2Kb long, has 14 misspellings, matches 2 of your keywords exactly, matches a synonym of another of your keywords, and was published 18 months ago, and

  - document B is 3Kb long, has 7 misspellings, matches 1 of your keywords exactly, matches two more keywords by synonym, and was published 5 months ago

simplicity is always the recipe for success, unfortunately, most engineers are drawn to complexity like moth to fire

if they were unable to do some AB testing between a ML search and a non-ML search, they deserve their failure 100%

there are not enough engineers blowing the whistle against ML

Amit was definitely against ML, long before "AI" had become a buzzword.

i worked on ranking during singhal's tenure, and it was definitely refreshing to see a "no black box ML ranking" stance.

@gregw134 Thank you for sharing! I've never worked at Google, but really curious what the engineering context is when you say "needs a launch" in the last line.

I'm glad you shared this.

My priors before reading this article were that an uncritical over-reliance on ML was responsible for the enshittification of Google search (and Google as a whole). Google seemed to give ML models carte blanche, rather than using the 80-20 rule to handle the boring common cases, while leaving the hard stuff to the humans.

I now think it's possible both explanations are true. After all, what better way to mask a product's descent into garbage than more and more of the core algorithm being a black box? Managers can easily take credit for its successes and blame the opacity for failures. After all, the "code yellow" was called in the first place because search growth was apparently stagnant. Why was that? We're the analysts manufacturing a crisis, or has search already declined to some extent?

Agreed. I struggled to keep going after "computer scientist class traitor". A very juvenile take that reflects poorly on the author, IMO.

I was strongly motivated to upvote and share this article. I probably upvote and share 1/500 articles I read on this website. So I disagree, I think his tone helps convey how the bulk of people feel about Google's search product and gives us a name to actually blame. Whereas every other blog writes about the decline of Google with a sad tone underwritten with nostalgia and always fails to provide any sort of root cause or solution, atleast this guy has given us good information and context to understand Googles decline. And of course, it's more entertaining when people are called out.

this is such a tiresome criticism. "this would be better if it were more boring" yeah okay and 4 people would read it and 2 of them would fall asleep during

Just to chime in, I started reading the article due to this comment, as I wanted to check the style of the writing, but the amount of in-your-face insistence to subscribe to yet another newsletter just put me off entirely.

There was a CTA right at the beginning (which appeared suddenly after 4-5 seconds of reading so I lost my place), then another one a few paragraphs later, then less than 3 seconds after that, a pop-up to subscribe!

At that point I was so annoyed I just scrolled to the end to see how many more of these distractions I would have to endure, and then I found _yet_ another one and ALSO a bottom bar?

What gives? Is this really useful anymore? do people that subscribe after being harassed like this actually care about your articles?

I try to ignore these as much as possible, but holy cow, I just want to read this one article and maybe later _if_ I find it interesting I might read a couple more and THEN actually subscribe.

I am really annoyed by the amount of distracting stuff these "blogs" put in front you as if they wanted you to avoid reading the material. What is wrong with these people?

The problem there is that nobody wrote that article, someone did write this one. You should ask yourself why that is.

I agree and it's especially frustrating because it's such a vital topic. Since at least ~2020 the utility of Google Search has declined dramatically and it appears much of the cause is actions intentionally taken by Google prioritizing short-term ad revenue over long-term user value.

There was likely a significant change in cultural priorities inside Google driving this. While one person can certainly contribute to such a cultural change, it would be a better article if it focused on the change in cultural values itself.

I thought it was written very well, and was engaging. I could easily imagine it being dry and boring, otherwise, something that wouldn't hold my attention long enough to read through it to the end.

Yes, I felt that the style of the writing lead me to doubt whether I was reading the full story (and indeed, the way Prabhakar's work at IBM is minimized reinforced that impression).

I'm really glad the article came out though, it fills in some gaps that I was fairly confident about but didn't have anything other than my sense of the players and their actions to back up what I thought was going on.

I and a number of other people left in 2010. I went on to work at Blekko which was trying to 'fix' search using a mix of curation and ranking.

When I left, this problem of CPC's (the amount Google got per ad click in search) was going down (I believe mostly because of click fraud and advertisers losing faith in Google's metrics). While they were reporting it in their financial results, I had made a little spreadsheet[1] from their quarterly reports and you can see things tanking.

I've written here and elsewhere about it, and watched from the outside post 2010 and when people were saying "Google is going to steam roll everyone" I was saying, "I don't think so, I think unless they change they are dead already." There are lots of systemic reasons inside Google why it was hard for them to change and many of their processes reinforced the bad side of things rather than the good side. The question for me has always been "Will they pull their head out in time to recover?" recognizing that to do that they would have to be a lot more honest internally about their actions than they were when I was there. I was also way more pessimistic, figuring that they would be having company wide layoffs by 2015 to 2017 but they pushed that out by 5 years.

I remember pointing out to an engineering director in 2008 that Google was living in the dead husk of SGI[2] which caused them to laugh. They re-assured me that Google was here to stay. I pointed out that Wei Ting told me the same thing about SGI when they were building the campus. (SGI tried to recruit me from Sun which had a campus just down the road from where Google is currently.)

[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18_y-Zyhx-5a1_kcW-x7p...

[2] Silicon Graphics -- https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/peninsula-high-tech...

The 2010-2013 timeline was also when the problem of ad fraud exploded. Google even acquired a company (or multiple, if I recon correctly: https://www.ft.com/content/352c7d8e-9acc-11e3-946b-00144feab... ). You had these companies popping up left and right that were snooping on Google and the emerging programmatic advertising environment to see if the websites and the traffic delivered were legit, and there were some scary numbers flying around.

The whole problem kind of got swept under the rug with most advertising ecosystems implementing a checkbox solution for clean traffic, and the web turned mobile user first.

My impression is that ad fraud never disappeared - it just got sanitized and rolled in with the other parts of the ad stack.

1. Do you know what caused it ? 2. How did the hostility look like ? 3. How did you circumvented them ? 4. What did your search service do ?

Before 2019, the year most people who had issues with Google Search gave as the last one it was decent was 2012, so that tracks.

How many companies have management consultants taken down? It's quite amazing how bad they are at anything. Peter Thiel's hatred for consultants is really legit.

I enjoy reading this chap's stuff. It's not the way that I would write, but he's got a much broader audience than I do, so he obviously is meeting the needs of the reading population.

I do feel that I can't argue with his stuff, although it is very dark and cynical (and, truth be told, I have a lot of dark and cynical, in me, as well, but I try not to let it come out to play, too often).

Agreed - I can appreciate the sentiment and the history, but the ad hominem is not really necessary to prove the point and undermines the credibility of the post.

I still use Google, but man has it become difficult to get to what I want.

I disagree. ratfuck is a specific term, not just a general pejorative. and I think class traitor is appropriate here as well. but i get what you're saying. that's the result, pro and con, of the shift away from edited journalism to stuff like ed's newsletter.

This is going to sound crazy, but do you know what the web really needs right now in 2024? A new, searchable directory. Like the old Yahoo! Directory or DMOZ. Just a carefully curated list of trusted sites that are made and managed by humans and for humans.

Reddit is usually very bad, because it's heavily astroturfed and trivially easy for marketing firms to game. Something else is required.

I have been using Google search for many years now and for the past few years have been wondering if the search has really gone bad or is it just me. I remember the days when searching for something used to bring up a few sponsored links separately and I could go page after page with different results on each page allowing me to access a wealth of information and extending my reach deep into the internet. Now, it is all sponsored links and the same ones page after page. It is so sad to see and the worse part is that I am not seeing any alternative. Bing is equally bad, DDG only marginally better. I hope there comes an alternative soon but I also realize coming into this space is certainly not easy.

LLMs and astro-turfing have ruined that approach. I honestly don't know where to get information from these days.

I append GitHub:) and then I switch back to chatgpt

Yeah, the same for me. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for every query and it's often too US specific.

Nah as someone who spent years getting beaten by wordpress admins with barely enough neural complexity to be called vertebrates in search results I'm going to concur with the author-- Prabhakar Raghavan has been waging a war against humanity's greatest communication medium and worse -- he's winning. He deserves all this contempt and more.

He's at least earned the equivalent of the Ajit Pai FCC chair treatment but because John Oliver and his audience can't understand this sorta complexity without a massive concurrent media literacy push it will never happen.

I'm not generally for singling out a person and slinging mud at them, but, I also feel like unless there's a real social cost to acting the way these parasitic executives act, there's little incentive for them to change their behavior. There should be a sense of shame in ruining a once good product for career benefits and short term growth. I think the tone is appropriate in that it conveys that this is not a good-faith effort gone wrong, but rather an executive acting in a cynical and reprehensible way.

About that...

https://www.404media.co/ai-is-poisoning-reddit-to-promote-pr...

Just saw this article on my news feed.

That being said, Google search is 100% dead. I append “reddit” to every Google query to get actual results from people, and I don’t see it on Reddit, I give up on my query.

I just want to point out that there are other search engines out there. I use search.brave.com and like it far better than google.

Considering what these guys have done to google search, I think this is the absolute minimum set of words they deserve.

Totally agree. His post loses credibility when he turns it into a class war instead of just focusing on why search quality was destroyed.

Still, I haven’t read this account from anywhere else. Everyone else missed the story.

There are ways to call out people for being bad at their job

That is not at all what the article is doing. The article is saying the person is doing a very good job doing bad things.

I think the tone is warranted given the scale of the problem. I don't think we should mollify complaints about products that literal billions of people depend on just because they're not nice.

I am dreading the day when reddit becomes full of hot posts. I don't know what filter will I use then. I guess HN? But even I don't think we'll be safe from the GPTs here either.

Purely speculation of course, but based on what they've been up to since letting go of the reigns of Google: because squeezing every possible drop of revenue out of the product helps fund the things they're now more interested in engaging in (self-driving, longevity, etc.)

The cynical assumption would be that they're just sitting on the extremely vast hoards of money and greedy for more. The (slightly) less cynical assumption is that their interest in Search nowadays is as a piggy bank for projects they consider more important.

Worth noting though the latter has long been the going assumption internally at Google: Search was the cash cow that funded Google's expeditions in finding the Next Big Thing. This plan has been complicated by the appearance that Google seems to not be terribly good at the kind of product execution that would lead them to the Next Big Thing.

speculation: they care, they know the people involved, and think highly of them.

Larry & Sergey are only humans. They can get bamboozled by people just like anyone. And they are in a situation where the very best bamboozlers are trying to bamboozle them, all the time. The people "failing up" are, in some cases, the Lebron James's of bamboozlement.

It's quite strange to see very capable people fall for such types, but it happens, I've seen it - and everyone around saw it except the very capable person.

they have much more money than they really need for everyday happiness.

You get older, you lose the willpower and energy to fight the machine

They have enormous power, but they are now also up against vast armies of lawyers and executives and lobbyists who will whisper and whine in their ears all day

Do I, Larry Page, really want to deal with all of that with my failing health and depleting energy?

I knew Google had jumped the shark when Larry and Sergey started trying to convert a Boeing jet into a corporate jet.

That was a couple of years before the rest of us started smelling smoke coming out.

They may be concerned, but what can they do? Google has poisoned the well, and the entire web is now a swamp of SEO driven drivel.

Forget about a "Jobs returning to Apple" miracle. As they say, "you can't get there from here". There's no easy path for Google back from the short term profit-driven corner they've painted all of us into.

I can imagine this happening in many places: 1) Idealist phase. 2) Hype phase. 3) Novelty wears off = Leave. 4) Bean counter phase. 5) ???

I have long suspected there is more to it than that, the giveaway being that once you are in what is currently the Alphabet level executive group a fundamentally different set of rules and standards are applied compared to what is considered allowed in Google, and these two did not used to be so divergent. This is a far dirtier game than many want to accept.

They don't care about Alphabet/Google at all. They've fully moved on.

Even if Alphabet lost all its market value tomorrow, they've already cashed out enough of their stock to have thousands of lifetimes of money.

They have achieved Nirvana. And they have enough dough to last several lifetimes.

Concern why?

https://es.finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG/?guccounter=1&guce_r...

And they know exactly what’s happening. In 2006 they said,

“we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”

http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-advertising-and-search-e...

I assume their wealth is not particularly tied to Google stock. Eggs, baskets etc.

I just recently switched to Kagi. It's worth paying a few bucks to get decent results.

I'm like this with Microsoft products. Anytime I need to buy one, I'm so worried I'm going to buy the wrong one. Once I have it, I'm worried its attached to the wrong account. Once I run it, I'm worried it wont start and I'll need to install it through some weird microsoft store. Then when its working, I'm worried my OS is going to slow down because of telemetry reporting. And I really hope microsoft team screen share works during an important meeting.

Google is disappointing. Microsoft actually makes me scared. Fortunately Apple hasnt really made its way into corporate life, so I've been spared their punishments.

This is my experience too, I'm baffled that when making a basic search about a programming language on Google, the top results are only SEO garbage that waste your time for a basic answer. I'm better off asking GPT those days.

I tried to lie to myself because Google occupies a lot of good emotions and I have great memories, but it is incredible how many searches were replaced by a simple prompt to ChatGPT, except when I add a site:reddit.com to my Google search.

For example, if I want to benchmark products I go directly to some subreddits and make my own benchmark spreadsheet.

Then why use it? I switched to DuckDuckGo years ago and it's fine.

For what it's worth, I have the opposite issue - when I can't find what I'm looking for on more privacy focused search engines, I go to google because 99 times out of 100 it gives me what I'm looking for in the easiest/quickest way.

Kagi ftw

I've literally made the jump last week and switched all my defaults over to bing, after Google couldn't find the simplest query I had about a video game that Bing found in first result. I'm just so done with google.

I feel there's a place for a search engine that doesn't give an f about currency / recent results.

Although sometimes useful, I find my my search results contaminated by popular, recent content.

And it must cost Google a lot to continuously scrape the web.

Start learning how to accurately prompt ai's, and have valid and constructive conversations with them. This replaces 80% of the need for search, and gives you a number of valuable things search could never provide including valuable and constructive critiques and analysis. If you think that you can't do this with llms because they are just parrots that means you have not read the latest papers on prompting and meet update your beliefs on the capabilities of llms like gpt4. These things do effective critical reasoning, with increasingly low rates of hallucination.

To reduce the anxiety of search, use AI enhanced search to filter through the dross and find both meaningful search terms and results.

After I did this my search anxiety reduced back to the level it was around 2012-2014, when Google had an effective search product. The quality of life improvement on search alone has been profound. But when you add in the fact that gpt4 can also help with communications issues, conflict resolution, and understanding my own complex and sometimes baffling emotions, the quality of life increase has been far greater than anything Google search ever gave me.

Please consider upskilling with llm assisted search and analysis skills.

People have been robbed of their livelihoods

That's absurd. People gambled with their livelihood, some got rich, and most lost.

I feel like google is prioritizing reddit way more than regular forums . Quora is the second most annoying thing , Search for y , Click on top result which is Quora > Either it's a personal opinion or a brand account answering or the real answer is locked behind subscription . Not to mention the dominance of large brands like this https://detailed.com/google-control/ and non existent personal sites . But i am still pessimistic about new search engines like bing has backing of a behemoth microsoft yet can't copy simple features from google.

I also follow SERoundtable (I have worked as SEO/digital marketer/developer for roughly 20 years), but tend to discount many of the comments due to the assumption that many of the people complaining in broken English may not actually have the quality of site that they believe they do, but there are tons of good sites getting caught up in updates-- not just now, but in every update. The past ~2-3 years have had entire types of sites (e.g., useful blogs, data driven sites, useful/non-spammy aggregator sites) get wholesale demoted/deranked/deindexed.

In ~2016 Google started shifting towards optimizing for financial objectives more aggressively than user experience. Timing updates to coincide with beginning/end of fiscal quarters, blending ads, features solely created to drive incremental searches (People Also Ask/Related Searches), various misaligned defaults within GAds interface, branded search extortion, stance against header bidding, etc.. Essentially when they stopped promoting the "Don't be evil." slogan, they had legitimate reason to do so.

If I could give anyone advice with regards to establishing a website that is reliant on Google for traffic-- it would be to be extremely careful. I have one site now that is super high utility for end users, great UX, super fast, high repeat user rate, no ads/tracking/popup spam, great feedback from users and it is -60% in Google traffic from the March 2024 core update. There is 0 support from anyone at Google to identify why a site suddenly loses traffic. There are search liaisons who give snarky replies, but good luck getting any constructive feedback.

Even relying on paid traffic is just as dangerous-- given the black box that is Quality Score (it ties mostly to Click Through Rate, but has adjustable floor to increase effective costs) and Google's consistent drive away from measurable performance that helped them destroy traditional marketing channels so successfully.

All that I can think is that there is absolute panic at Google right now. When >50% of product searches start directly on Amazon (https://searchengineland.com/50-of-product-searches-start-on...), Google can't siphon anything off. With Meta adding things like Llama 3 to FB Messenger, there is going to be another huge hit to Google query volume-- albeit most likely low commercial intent queries (see: not as monetizable by Google), at least initially, but it will help increase user familiarity with chatbots and observed data will probably help improve Meta ad targeting ability in ways that may rival search query intent.

High value categories like home services, banking and finance are among Google's last relatively safe bastions of profit-- but eventually advertisers in these spaces have to reach a level of sophistication to realize they're giving too much of their margin to Google, leading to push-back. Highly fragmented, lower margin spaces like restaurants (or other "near me" driven niches) that have success on GMaps seem relatively safe for Google at this point. If Meta handles the chatbot transition (if it actually happens) well, they stand to gain a lot of ground there, too, given that they do already have a decent amount of small businesses who use FB pages as their sole internet presence, along with associated meta-data like hours/location/menus/reviews.

Ok, but the likelihood is 99.9% that I would rather read posts on Reddit than any LLM autogenerated ad laden malware garbage from SEO spammers.

I hope it clicks for Google soon that they are “fucked” and will never recover users they lost to OpenAI, etc.

It happens to pretty much all companies. A paradigm shift pulling the rag from underneath the big company, and the big company just can't turn itself to ride the new paradigm. Like say Sun Micosrosystems not able to switch from their super-expensive Big Iron to horizontally [super-]scaled cheap x86. And usually it doesn't "click" - the management just rides the gravy train until it lasts.

I've been for years wondering what will displace Google - I was sure that such paradigm shift would happen as always, I just couldn't say what it will be (my imagination was just failing at how one can displace a trillion dollar gorilla), and now we get to observe that process - the tech like snake dropping old skin and emerging in a beatifull new one - in all its glory again.

Wow, it had been years since I read a Barry Schwartz post, a SEO authority since back in the day, I didn't realize his forum had turned so nasty.

Funny you mention 'No content creator thinks to themselves, “let me go write my next article on Reddit”'. Schwartz and many other SERP/SEO experts talked about writing for medium, circa ~2013, to raise their Google rankings, back when everyone jumped on the medium bandwagon.

Google is bleeding ends users and content creators alike. If search results are getting worse for end users, many AI price points (free or $20/month) or ad-free paid search (Kagi) are eating away at Google's market share. At the other end, content producers which had a symbiotic revenue sharing relationship are also jumping ship.

As you point out, Google will likely never recover, they dropped the ball at both ends: worse end user experience and worse ad revenue sharing, both of which were their lifeblood. I think Google in a few years will be like Yahoo search or AOL email before it, they will still have users, but most likely not by free will, but rather users landed through OEM/marketing deals.

The quora ranking has to be one of the most morally bankrupt deals in modern history.

honestly, 99% of the time I don't need search. I want AI. I don't want to have to use a weird syntax to 'talk to a search engine'. sometimes I don't even know what the word is that I am searching for. I want something I can just ... talk to.

I use to use search every day, now I use it about once a month.

Kagi is still a good search engine though. Hopefully they continue to improve that part too, even if they do AI stuff.

I just want a search engine that prioritizes small sites again

I just don’t want to see another webmd fluff article when I search for a medical query or some gigantic news site’s affiliate section when I search for a product

Half my searches have site:reddit.com appended to them

Here's my requirement: if I'm using a VPN, don't constantly ask me to do CAPTCHA.

Talk about finding what you are looking for. What does that search even tell us? Of course Kagi is pursuing AI. Why is that bad? It’s a promising search technology.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Kagi’s vision involves organic growth and a pay-for-what-you-use users-are-the-customer Internet. They’re giving us a chance to pay for both a browser and search. Something this community has been asking for.

Kagi is sure interested in the role of AI in searching, but the fact is that their product works great, so why the negativity?

It's not just you, but perhaps there aren't enough of us to make this commercially viable?

At this point I’m not even sure there is anything to find. The web as we remember seem to have withered away, suffocated by SEO optimized content farms

Brave search works pretty well.

"Linkbait" implies it's hyperbole, but I would argue that the headline is a perfect description of the argument being made here.

"Prabhakar Raghavan is killing Google"

"Google's Death from Within: Prabhakar Raghavan"

"Blame Prabhakar Raghavan for Google's Crappy Search"

"Google Sucks. Because of Prabhakar Raghavan"

"Prabhakar Raghavan is the man killing Google Search."

"Yahoo Search Killer Prabhakar Raghavan Turns Death Ray on Google"

"Prabhakar Raghavan and the no good very bad Google search."

I'm not taking a position for or against the article; I haven't read it.

If you haven't read it, why are you in a position to suggest whether the title is accurate to the article's contents or not?

That's what the article is arguing though. That a certain individual is 'killing' (not killed yet) Google Search. A different title would be misleading.

"Google ad revenue stalled, so they made SERPs worse on purpose"

I agree - and flagged it as a result. It is clearly a hit piece and has promptly even made it to Prabhakar's wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prabhakar_Raghavan

those who can, write. those who cannot, change the meaning of titles.

about time to program websites to serve JWZ balls when HN tries these tricks to confuse its users IMHO

People failing with golden parachutes, and others failing upwards into even more lucrative roles.

I read stuff like this all the time, but this take is actually extremely reductive. (Otherwise, every moron out there would be making 7 figures, but they don't.) It's not as if these folks are utterly incompetent in their roles, but in fact they optimize for things you think don't matter (but actually do.) For example, if you can get a promotion just by knowing people, why would you optimize for building a better product, when you could optimize for getting a box and inviting C-execs at a football game?

To wit, sitting on a board is often "free money" and those positions are purely obtained by networking. Life is much more of a popularity contest than people (especially engineers) want to believe and EQ pays off much more than IQ does. We are, at the end of the day, social creatures.

Imho, the problem is scale.

At certain company sizes, the direct output of entire divisions ceases to be visible to leadership.

What they receive instead are reports that filter up through management.

Consequently, when they promote people, they're doing so on the basis of what they've seen.

Invariably, this selects for shitty business types who can spend the majority of their time ensuring their name is first on successful initiatives and scrubbed off failed ones.

You know what it would take for a technologist to match that?

200% time: 100% to get the job done + 100% to match corporate politicking

They're not fluff pieces. They're ads. Bought and paid for.

All the adulation and covers devoted to Sam Bankman-Fried come to mind.

People failing with golden parachutes, and others failing upwards into even more lucrative roles. I think that's the thing that is eating away at the core of our society

And it's not just "people" in general. It's certain people: It's people beyond a certain tipping point in their careers.

If I, as a low level worker bee fail in my job, to the point where I need to leave, I just leave and jump back into Resume Thunderdome to fight for the privilege of doing another 11 round interview nightmare full of code challenges and take home tests.

If my first level manager fails and leaves, he might have a bit of a tough time too, maybe a little easier since he has that all-important "manager experience" that unlocks many doors in silicon valley that are shut to me.

On the opposite side, if anyone in my company who is SVP and up fails spectacularly, they are 100% leaving with an exit bonus of $millions and are probably getting a title bump in their next job: a job that is literally sitting there waiting for them to take, no job application needed.

I visualize it as a hill. At my level, when you leave the company and let go of the rock, it rolls down and to the left, back into Thunderdome. Past a certain crest in the hill, which we'll call "Director," the rock rolls down and to the right when you fail, and you get better and better positions.

People easily see this exclusive club and yea it's demotivating as hell, and eats away at the idea that the world is just, fair, egalitarian. It's certainly corrosive to society.

Wired had a period where they were absolutely excellent, under Chris Anderson as their chief editor. When he left it was like a switch was thrown; wired almost immediately began to resemble GQ or other "general interest" magazines, with the only differentiating factor being asking the interviewee what apps they have on their iPhone

The author called Sundar a McKinsey consultant, not Raghavan.

A quick note: I used “management consultant” there as a pejorative. While he exhibits all the same bean-counting, morally-unguided behaviors of a management consultant, from what I can tell Raghavan has never actually worked in that particular sector of the economy.

It also seems like a stretch to say that Yahoo's former "Chief Strategy Officer" had no influence on Yahoo's management direction.

My favorite thing about McKinsey is that they are hated for 2 reasons:

1. Allegedly ruining companies with mismanagement.

2. Making companies people don't like too successful.

That's more an indictment of the business skills of the critics than McKinsey.

This is a very long way of saying a very intelligent person was “just following orders”.

Gomes said no. Raghavan clearly didn’t.

If that’s not a clear cut case of “bearing responsibility” I don’t know what is.

I didn't really get the same message from this article.

What I got was: Raghavan is/was a world-class computer scientist in his field, but actively pursued the management track and business strategy.

And for that, well, who's the blame him? If your main goal is to make an established company make more money - making wildly unpopular decisions (as far as the customer experience goes) can be tempting and easy.

The main problem here is that Google at that point was, and still is, a monopolistic behemoth. And frankly, why would they give a shit about what the customer thinks? 99% of google users are casual users that will neve scroll past the first page of search results, and will click on whatever top links google returns.

As far as enshitifacation goes, google is one of the worst offenders - so clearly anti user-friendly strategy is being rewarded.

So blaming Raghavan for what happened at Yahoo! is just stupid.

He joined yahoo in 2005, if my memory serves correctly yahoo was already pretty much IBM-dead by then.

The downfall of yahoo was due to the hard push of popup ads in the late 90s and very early 2000s. Much like the google history of today though, maximising metrics at the cost of user experience. But it all happened in yahoo way before he joined.

Yeah. But what do you expect when the boss comes from McKinsey? Not only does the place teach a particular skillset, it also selects for very peculiar employees. It would be downright weird if an ex-McKinsey employee were anything like a decent engineer.

I recently tried Kagi search (kagi.com) just to see what it was all about, and was instantly shocked at how different it felt, and that difference was mostly due to the complete absence of ads. It made me want to subscribe immediately.

Now I just don’t see them at all!

Boeing was put on the path to failure by James McNerney. He was their first non-engineer MBA CEO. A literal Jack Welch apprentice. He divested Spirit and chose to build the MAX instead of the 797.

Dennis Muilenburg was an engineer and handled the MAX crisis poorly but wasn’t responsible for the decision to divest key capabilities from Boeing or to optimize short-term sales over long-term survival by building the MAX instead of a new airliner.

It gets better:

a management consultant wearing an engineer costume

his expertise lies primarily in “failing up,” ascending through the ranks of technology on the momentum from the explosions he caused

I am directly citing emails revealed in discovery as part of the Department of Justice's antitrust suit against Google. They're all linked in there too! And you can even see who was CC'd. It's a little confusing because some of them are part of one big, fat thread that you have to read from the bottom up.

It's based on emails published as evidence in a trial:

* https://www.justice.gov/usdoj-media/atr/media/1322631/dl?inl...

* https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-11/417557.pdf

* https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-11/417581.pdf

There are plenty of links in the article to "emails released as part of the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google". I didn't read any of it as saying he was involved in those conversations, they're just conversations that have been made public.

The article has a bunch of links like this one: https://www.justice.gov/usdoj-media/atr/media/1322631/dl

If you follow them you'll get copies of email threads related to a suit against Google where the non-public information was revealed.

Yeah, the amazing thing is that everyone talks about how Google destroyed search, but fails to acknowledge that nobody with a better search emerged. The amount of money at stake with regards to search is such that the decline of search across the board is far more a reflection of a systemic cause than anything that happened inside any particular company.

clickbait fake news all over the screen

That’s my current experience with Google search as well, even for the most direct and obvious technical queries like “do X in Y language”

As a Xoogler from 2007-2013 it saddens me to hear how it's changed since I was there. At the time it was definitely one of the best places to work in tech for me at least.

relative to those old dunderheads babbling their opinions about users.

Why did I read this in Connie Sacks' voice talking to George Smiley (The Alec Guinness one)?

I'm sure they'll get Karla (Raghavan), in the end. It's his fanaticism that will do him in.

This fact metaphorically depicts how sad this story is.

It also highlights how selective the information & context provided in the story is.

I recently saved this book as it’s been recommended by a few people lately. Interesting

And yet, two search engines failed under his tenure. Maybe those who can't do should stick to teaching.

Yes, I think this is the more likely explanation, rather than the sinister story provided (afaik). I also use ChatGPT more than Google now.

LLMs are the future.

Making your search engine worse to squeeze profits now is not as big a deal as it would have been 5 years ago. Still sad, but I honestly care less and less about what Google search does now that we have ChatGPT, Claude, etc.

Caveat - it can't provide current information.

For me google search is still useful for weather, stock prices, flight prices, maps, also to reliably navigate to a website(e.g. of a bank).

But for all other (code/health/taxes/so many others) queries use chatgpt. For code occasionally need to go to API docs, if chatgpt (v4) hallucinates. Not very often, but does happen, if the requirement gets complicated, example involve some specific (older) versions of certain APIs.

That is so weird. For an article that appears to be based on extensive research, it’s hard to understand how the author missed that.

i love this person google scholar, it is important to this employee resume that the moment i click on this link i immediately see compact list of articles with brief introductions in plaintext. very easy to see everything and access exactly what i'm interested in almost immediately with a swift skim.

it sadly ironic how google search used to look like this, now it looks like bloated shit, this dude pushed ruining it, yet this guys resume google scholar page just looks so slick. wow what a slick, _compact_, looking resume page. wish google search looked like this

EDIT: we should advertise between the articles, missed revenue google scolar

In Brazil most of the ads I see on YT/Instagram are for scams indeed. Health scams, religious scams and financial/crypto scams, mostly.

my sister use to work at McKinsey, her favorite story was working on Obama's and McCain's campaign strategy at the same time. Heh talking about picking winners..

YouTube in India is in the government's pocket. If you have a channel that speaks against the government you are automatically pushed down in the search results, notification of your new videos suppressed for your subscribers etc.

And if you somehow manage to still gather enough Indian audience and you're doing sufficient damage then they block you in India entirely.

Don't forget their creation of Our failed border security protocols they helped design during the Obama administration. A McKinsey principal once bragged to me about being responsible for "kids in cages"

If half their work wasn't scrubbed from the internet or known publicly at all you'd be able to ctrl + F on their wikipedia page, type CIA and your screen would light up like a Christmas tree.

I try. I swear to god I try. Then the DDG search results come up, and they're just dumb. It's like they trained some dog to bring the search results. If it were a dog coming up with them, you would be amazed and rightly so. The dog reads, it vaguely understands the topic you're looking for. It can sort of find something related to it, but not really relevant. But look, it's actually a god doing it. Woohoo.

Of course, there is no dog, sadly. It's just some half-assed algorithm and a company too poor to spider the entire internet often or consistently. And when it fails, as it does more often than not, I search again on Google. This is the part where I'm dumb though. I know Google won't find what I want. This is 2024's Google, not 2015's Google. It has been nearly a decade now since it returned good results, useful results. Maybe I am performing a ritual, praying that the original Google returns. Maybe I have defective cognition and an addictive personality.

I no longer even know for certain whether Google was ever as good as I remember it to be. Maybe I have imagined it.

IIRC, they combined have about 51% voting shares

The shares they own give them 51% of the votes because when they negotiated a deal that gives them a lot more votes than anybody else. They own about 12% of the company.

Those numbers are for both of them combined. If one of them had a serious disagreement with the other they could join forces with other shareholders to create a new 51% majority.

According to this they own 86% of class B shares together: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/011516/top-5-g...

Using an adblocker for a search engine establishes an adversarial relationship. Why should I have to do that? Why can I not just turn off ads? Of course, we both know the answer to that. Google makes less money then. But this same motivation is affecting everything they do. If Google had their way, they'd put ads in front of your eyeballs even though you don't want it. I'd rather use a search engine that doesn't start from an adversarial position.

Shitty results increase the number of queries, because the initial query fails to produce a desired link, and it increases the number of ad clicks because the ads are comparatively helpful sitting next to the steaming pile of crap that is the results.

I thought the author covered this well in the breakdown of the "Code Yellow" results in 2019, and what happened when the resulting update reversed optimizations that had cut down on SEO spam.

Per the article, they purposefully rolled back suppression of spammy results:

In the March 2019 core update to search, which happened about a week before the end of the code yellow, was expected to be “one of the largest updates to search in a very long time. Yet when it launched, many found that the update mostly rolled back changes, and traffic was increasing to sites that had previously been suppressed by Google Search’s “Penguin” update from 2012 that specifically targeted spammy search results, as well as those hit by an update from an August 1, 2018, a few months after Gomes became Head of Search.

It boils down to: there used to be somewhat of a firewall between advertising and search divisions. Search's goal could be best results possible and advertising's goal could be most ads. The head of ads decided that wasn't good enough and said "all goals have to help ad goals" with the implicit suggestion that if a change to search was good for ads, but bad for users, then that was the path that was going to be taken.

I don't think you need to have a personal grudge to call someone out like in this article. Ensh*tifiers need to be punished (in the game theory sense) or everything will go to sh*.

Brutal? Yeah. But it's a great read.

I'd feel bad, but then I thought that Raghavan probably has a PR service, and this is a fair counterbalance to that.

PR needs short-sellers too.

Speaking of AI ruining Google search,

https://bsky.app/profile/dahosek.bsky.social/post/3kqm25jwsf...

Yeah he only co-authored 2 highly influential CS textbooks when he wasn't failing upward

I agree. Fuzzy searches are a bane of my existence. Like trying to search amazon for any specific detail about a product. All you get are basically the same promoted crap from a non-specific search. I just want my results.

Replying to myself, after re-reading from a different perspective, I wanna walk back on "uninteresting". At first I was expecting more out of why Gomes was kicked, but I realized I answered myself.

And the choice for Raghavan specifically seems like it does matter - there's a certain type of leadership that's empowered that wasn't before, and getting insight into what and why is quite interesting.

If it had been another person then it would have been appropriate to hold that person responsible. Individuals don't get free passes to do unethical acts just because corporations exist to take their liabilities. It's still beneficial to make examples of them.

Including X (formerly called Twitter)

unrealistic expectations

From my (admittedly limited!) experience, unrealistic expectations are often set only when you want to push a senior off the team, and then as the new exec comes in, they'll "re-evaluate" the trajectory such that goals are much more realistic for their teams.

Ugh. I have a feeling I know what happened.

People ran experiments where they showed big, ugly, profitable ads, and they convinced themselves that the metrics meant it was a positive experience for users.

p-Hacking, again and again.

I have a ton of sympathy for everyone involved in this. It's incredibly hard to have a good model of what is good for users, and to have metrics that measure relevant things, and to have the discipline to make yourself test a real hypothesis rather than hunt for evidence that proves your foregone conclusion. And to reward people for negative experiments.

All very hard to do.

And frankly, if Google can't do it right - who can?

I think you need really powerful product managers who happen to be right. And that's not sustainable. Not something you can plan on or measure. Only reward if you happen to be lucky enough to notice it. Ow.

Google has done this. They did offer a paid version that didn't have ads, but few actually used it.

word2vec, invented by Google, killed Google?

I mean, it would serve as a terrific headline but I don't really buy it, do you?

I think it's more "Very poor search results, infested with ads, killed Google's dreams of becoming the next Microsoft and will now die a slow death and end up making millions instead of billions".

Dying might not be that bad, after all.

a single person can make a huge difference,

This is probably the most true thing. It might depend on the person and the environment, but there are certainly people you cannot discount.

assign all blame to him as a manager.

Can you share who are the others we can blame?

To take something as useful as google search (was) and sacrifice it on Moloch’s altar for profits is profoundly bad. To the right person, such a level of callous indifference would inspire feelings of hatred.

ChatGPT is much better…

A glowing endorsement, but deserved? Under "more like this" we find multiple hit-pieces by Zitron, hating on one man. You guessed it, Musk Bad Man.

Never heard of Zitron, but I won't be back. His bitterness is on verge of unhealthy obsession. Oddly word-stuffed rants, sounds like he spent ages constructing different ways to criticise Musk.

"He has spent $44 billion in an attempt to make people love him only to be left with a very expensive way to make people angry at him every single day for the rest of his life."

So much hot air. "Fresh air of tech journalism," you say?

Another piece "Musk Is Dangerous To Society" I didn't read since the spoiler is kind of right there in the title!

Speculation: they gave up astroturfing, because they've fully abandoned search now that AI is the future.

Maybe even google no longer cares about shilling it (thinking it a loosing battle now).

we've got techtakes at awful.systems, though it rarely goes in as hard as n-gate.

Two reasons to use Marxist terminology for these things:

1) It literally terrorizes capitalists

2) It's hilariously catty and fun

[Edit: not sure why demz downvotez, ~owo~. Hope it's cuz I made demz capitawists a widdle angy, uwu :3

Not always, though. Sometimes it's the finance folks who keep the lights on, and when they leave, the lights go out pretty quickly.

Why do you think they bought Android and built Chrome? :)

stepped up from working 100 hours a week to working 120 hours

That's 17 hours a day, which seems unlikely (for an extended period of time) without some kind of performance enhancing substance. Also, I'm not sure I'd want to use the end product of that kind of death march for anything important.

When I was younger I thought heroes and villains were real, then I got older and realized heroes and villains are never clear cut (is it even a useful distinction?) - then I got older and realized I was right all along, heroes and villains existed all along.

Evil is real. But so too is good. You’re in the middle stage