The man who killed Google Search?

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

by elorant • 2 years ago

1884 864 2 years ago

wheresyoured.at

swiftcoder2• 2 years ago

a computer scientist class traitor that sided with the management consultancy sect

Well if that ain't the purdiest turn of phrase

bsimpson• 2 years ago

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

supportengineer• 2 years ago

How can one learn to do this?

seanhunter2• 2 years ago

What's the source for all of this? It includes reportage of a bunch of conversations where there's no way this guy was present.

frereubu• 2 years ago

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.

edzitron3• 2 years ago

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.

seanhunter2• 2 years ago

Thanks for responding. That'll teach me to skim-read while I'm on a meeting so can't give it my full attention.

DaiPlusPlus• 2 years ago

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 seems no-one, not even Google, can escape Outlook-style email concatenation.

Jtsummers• 2 years ago

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.

neuronexmachina• 2 years ago

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

skilled5• 2 years ago

Google is doing something similar now[0], both from a searchers and a site owners perspective.

Barry Schwartz regularly posts Google updates on his site[1], for over a decade no less. Since August 2023, those updates have been reaching the 500 mean comment range with many updates reaching 700-900 comment range. And this has been happening for 8 straight months!

People have been robbed of their livelihoods and many have caught strays, with the culprit being that Reddit, Quora, and LinkedIn have tripled/doubled their traffic.

I just don’t understand why Google can’t create a Discussions panel and let people decide what they want to view as opposed to flat out cutting creators off at the knees.

No content creator thinks to themselves, “let me go write my next article on Reddit”.

Now they are throwing AI in the mix also which is probably the dumbest thing they could have done, but I get why they are doing it.

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

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40067605

[1] https://www.seroundtable.com/category/google-updates

tgv2• 2 years ago

People have been robbed of their livelihoods

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

arromatic23• 2 years ago

I have the same opinion but Google does downrank actual personal site/blogs even if it's useful or good and serves you garbage.

skilled5• 2 years ago

Google now uses an ML classifier to assert the “helpfulness” of content. Your entire website gets penalized if the algorithm thinks your site is “not good enough”.

And so far, for the last 8 months, not a single person has had their site reinstated after this penalty.

That is the very definition of being robbed.

zrn900• 2 years ago

Those people did everything according to Google's guidelines then Google changed everything and screwed them over. That's what has been happening all the way since 2010 when they issued their first update and penalized all the small sites for following their guidelines. They are screwing everyone for their shareholders' sake.

gambled with their livelihood

Google owns ~90% of search. Its basically a public utility at this point. On which every small business owner has to rely. There is no saying "Go use a competitor" when using a competitor means you will lose access to ~90% of world search traffic. Imagine your salary being cut down to 10% of what it was last month - that's what using an 'alternative' to google for your business means.

These tech giants have been holding literal unregulated power over the livelihoods of people for decades now. And as we have recently come to see in many examples, they use that power to screw over everyone for shareholders.

The situation we have today is a situation that is as crazy as privatizing the entire road network and allowing an unregulated company to do whatever with the traffic that runs on it.

arromatic23• 2 years ago

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.

skilled5• 2 years ago

Quora and LinkedIn are also heavily overrun with AI garbage. Quora does it flat out, and LinkedIn launched Pulse to farm millions of AI generated topics and then invite its users to contribute.

LinkedIn is now one of the top results for topics like metaphysics, quantum physics, etc.

It’s a clown show.

TheCleric3• 2 years ago

I feel like at least on Reddit results you'll get something that may be helpful. The Quora results have NEVER resulted in something useful for me.

trhway• 2 years ago

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.

drubio• 2 years ago

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.

vgeek• 2 years ago

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.

arromatic23• 2 years ago

So everyone should start making html only site like danluu or pre -2000 ?

stefan_• 2 years ago

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.

rvba3• 2 years ago

Spammers are smart enough to post their spam on reddit too. Then upvote it with bots.

ametrau5• 2 years ago

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

refulgentis2• 2 years ago

This is a bit long and histrionical in a ways that can make it seem to lack credibility, at times -- easiest example: maybe there was a joke in 2008 that "Code Yellow" was named after a lead's tanktop. But it's very much what you'd think, there's a "Code Red" and "Code Yellow" and Code Red is DEFCON 1, not Code Yellow. Shorthand for signalling "this is your manager^3 saying its okay to work on this, in case your manager^1 gets in the way"

The thing I'd like to draw your attention as a Xoogler, 2016 to 2023, is this bit:

Gomes, who was a critical part of the original team that make Google Search work, who has been credited with establishing the culture of the world’s largest and most important search engine, was chased out by a growth-hungry managerial types led by Prabhakar Raghavan, a management consultant wearing an engineer costume.

This is the dynamic you can hang your hat on as being how Google changed post-Sundar, definitely post 2020. A la Sculley era at Apple.

It's a huge company, there's pockets of good and bad.

But by far and large, unless you're happily settled into a corner of a corner of an org humming along coding on some infra that is both crucial and yet not politically important, 'standard business' decision-making has infected every corner. Scaling meant importing a lot of management from other companies, and not great ones. And the self-induced "crisis" of not growing revenue 20% every year has left them empowered relative to those old dunderheads babbling their opinions about users.

There's all sorts of knock on effects: cliques became much more important, especially as a lot of managers promoted a new layer and withdrew from day-to-day once WFH started. It was shocking to see people unleashed: rampant power abuses, hiring of friends. I was shocked how quickly it turned into not just a regular company, but a bad company. Partially because it had no immune system / practice dealing with bad behavior. Everyone is just trying to get to tomorrow now, instead of doing the right thing, even if it is hard.

EDIT: One more thought: It's a lot harder to fight these effects with the overly-polite-to-point-of-vacuousness I saw the higher up I got. You end up with all these biases that are grounded and kind but get you to the point where you're enabling bad stuff. Ex. "no one person is responsible for failure/success of their product" enables "for some reason Yahoo's ex-search-head is high up at Google, and saying the right vacuous things that rhyme with The New Order: stonk must go up. So now we get more evil."

I'm still sad about the launches I participated in that were straight up lies when demo'd and advertised. Rot went all the way up from what I saw, VPs were more than happy to throw their name on outright lies if it was the hot thing that year at IO. Then when it isn't, they disappear and leave vague instructions, and the real shitty stuff starts, because now middle managers just want the old cool thing as 1 of 6 things in their portfolio.

zaphar2• 2 years ago

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.

refulgentis2• 2 years ago

Sometimes I joke it was me - ex. my first year was the first year with no holiday gift. I'm really grateful I got there when I did, it was just enough to give me a year or two of enough of old Google that I can look back on it fondly.

I did peer counselling for a year or two, before leaving, and still follow along on Blind, and it was utterly depressing to hear from someone who joined the last couple years/post-COVID. 100% just another job now, besides the comp., and given the 1.5 years of constant firings and attendant self-interested behavior, you're forced to recognize this very quickly.

throwaway35777• 2 years ago

Are there any places like it nowadays?

spitfire• 2 years ago

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.

shombaboor• 2 years ago

Thinking about search ads over time, I had forgotten how ads were clearly marked in a blue box way back when.

Scoundreller• 2 years ago

Now I just don’t see them at all!

lo_fye2• 2 years ago

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.

coldpie• 2 years ago

Friend! Get thee to https://ublockorigin.com/ ! You can thank me later!

mistrial9• 2 years ago

google search was horribly unusable for me yesterday in English from California.. it was obviously changing my search terms and then delivering "popular" content, not at all what I was searching for.. literally not at all..

this sea change is related to the AI rush -- very disappointing and at the same time alarming, due to the previous universal reliability of google search

dhosek• 2 years ago

Speaking of AI ruining Google search,

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

arromatic23• 2 years ago

That's crazy.

fireflash38• 2 years ago

The tech fluff pieces are wild. And that entire paragraph about how the execs for Yahoo failed horribly, hired a new one, and that one lied about his degrees, and they hired another.

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: basic contracts like "fail and you won't get rewarded" or "succeed and you'll get rewarded" are just not there. You see people fail upwards constantly, and it eats away at your incentive to do any sort of good work, because it just doesn't fucking matter.

Edit: WIRED is the worst about these useless tech fluff pieces. It's like they make insane money from just fauning all over whatever tech CEO is the hottest right.

ethbr17• 2 years ago

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

autokad3• 2 years ago

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.

Yeah but it doesn't have to be this way. I put in these details that are summarized in 1 or 2 easy to read bullet points, but asked to remove them because 'leaders are thinking about things on a strategic level'.

And don't get me started on promotion. If I find/do something that improves the teams performance by 10x, "that is just doing my job, please don't bring up stuff like that to management." "you need to have impact across teams". So every team is trying to make every other team take on their 'product' and no one wants to take on other teams product because even if it improves their quality / productivity, they don't get anything for it.

RankingMember• 2 years ago

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

kurthr• 2 years ago

Who is going to pay you more for the puff piece journamalism than a multi-billionaire conman?

https://prospect.org/article/press-release-journamalism/

bboygravity• 2 years ago

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

hughesjj2• 2 years ago

Potato potato

ryandrake• 2 years ago

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.

dvt3• 2 years ago

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.

kerkeslager3• 2 years ago

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.)

Your parenthesized logic is fallacious. No one is saying there's no filter of who gets to make 7 figures. What people are saying is that merit isn't the filter.

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.

You seem to be presenting nepotism as if it's a feature when it's obviously a bug.

I mean, do you not see how building worse products because you can get away with knowing people is worse for society?

If you cause your company to fail but you keep getting promoted because you are good at managing upward, you are incompetent in your role.

Your role is supposed to be making your company successful. Your role IS NOT supposed to be networking yourself into free money.

thenberlin• 2 years ago

I don't think you refuted the underlying point so much as gave cause to it. The idea isn't that simply stupid people rise to the top, it's that people who are capable of gaming a system without providing for or attending to the system they're deftly traversing are floated by their EQ/credentials/jargon straight over the corpses of the things they were actually meant to shepherd or build. I have seen this over and over again, and frankly managed to sometimes straddle the line enough to play along and be the beneficiary of this sort of corporate backchannel -- it's a very real, very human thing.

I've watched wildly incapable people bluff their way up a corporate ladder, fail over the course of two years in an elevated role, and then use that previous title to bluff their way into better positions elsewhere (and then leave those positions before they're totally found out to move on to somewhere else with a yet better title). I've watched people come out of McKinsey into the startup world, talk a major game -- they are the best conjurors of business fantasy at strat plannings and my god, those decks -- but then utterly fail to deliver for years only to end up with SVP roles at major companies on the "strength" of their backgrounds.

I get it: play the man, not the puck or whatever...but eventually somebody has to make sure the puck ends up in the fucking net and not sold off to buttress quarterly earnings.

ChrisMarshallNY6• 2 years ago

Reminds me of the Bruce Willis/Kim Basinger movie Blind Date.

In that movie, Willis plays a hard worker that is unpolished, while his slick, suited co-worker just sails on through life.

gopher_space• 2 years ago

To wit, sitting on a board is often "free money" and those positions are purely obtained by networking.

The people I know who've successfully demonstrated their ability to operate at the C level are addicted to the role and have more money than time. I wonder if we can come up with some kind of prestige leveling system and just not pay them after a while.

A physical $100 million CEO coin with embedded connection to a purpose-built government blockchain. The coins are non-transferable.

paradox4603• 2 years ago

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

arromatic23• 2 years ago

Question : Why larry and brin not caring about it ? They built one of world's best and biggest company and it's dying . Even if they did not care about that , their money is still tied to google stock right ? That should raise some concern from them.

riku_iki3• 2 years ago

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

arromatic23• 2 years ago

100 billion (round figured) isn't a lot when you are going to create a new large company or invent fusion or fix climate .

sidcool2• 2 years ago

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

pfortuny• 2 years ago

Concern why?

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

danielmarkbruce• 2 years ago

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.

arromatic23• 2 years ago

I assume they use google search at least once after fall in quality and noticed it . Or maybe they got google search founder edition for Them. Edit : Does any one have email/twitter of larry/brin ? If you have can you try emailing them . Or is it public ? Gonna try emailing them

spaceman_20205• 2 years ago

Pichai must be Grima Wormtongue tier bamboozler

potatolicious4• 2 years ago

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.

morphentropic• 2 years ago

Man they used to drop some awesome stuff: Google Maps, GMail (remember the hype over Gmail invites?), Google Earth... then they just stopped improving stuff and started releasing multiple versions of things and abandoned them all, over and over again. Very strange.

arromatic23• 2 years ago

This makes sense .

beachy• 2 years ago

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.

spaceman_20205• 2 years ago

The web is over now. Google first, AI later killed any incentive to create content for the open web

hinkley• 2 years ago

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.

arromatic23• 2 years ago

I am unable to understand your comment . Can you please explain a little bit more ?

leephillips• 2 years ago

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...

xjay• 2 years ago

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

arromatic23• 2 years ago

What does it mean ?

fidotron• 2 years ago

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.

arromatic23• 2 years ago

Can you explain a bit more ?

spaceman_20205• 2 years ago

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?

arromatic23• 2 years ago

What are they whispering ? more profit or please rank my site or i will sue you .

strunz• 2 years ago

Page is only 50 and doesn't have any health issues that I know aside from his vocal cord thing 10 years ago

smt88• 2 years ago

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.

denton-scratch• 2 years ago

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

cynicalsecurity• 2 years ago

Maybe they know that the AI is going to destroy Google anyway, same as any other search engine, so why bother.

sidcool2• 2 years ago

Wow. This man seems to have a personal grudge against Raghavan. I knew people hate Pichai, but this brutal.

ethbr17• 2 years ago

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.

programjames• 2 years ago

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*.

imp0cat2• 2 years ago

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

janalsncm• 2 years ago

If you have two people, one who wants to build a great product and the other who wants to climb the corporate ladder, the one climbing the ladder will always end up managing the one building great products.

OnionBlender• 2 years ago

I'm so sick of search systems ignoring or changing my search string. LinkedIn is especially bad for this. If I search for "OpenGL", many of the results don't contain the one word I searched for. Many of the results are "promoted" jobs from Microsoft that have nothing to do with graphics.

On Apple’s job site, it will include OpenCL jobs in addition to OpenGL.

It is probably more efficient for my time and sanity to create a web scraper and run my own searches offline. At least for searching for job postings.

chankstein38• 2 years ago

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.

rrrix15• 2 years ago

It would be nice to have some generic/universally accepted syntax for fuzzy/non-fuzzy(?) search behavior.

e.g. something like "exact match for this string" and ~(similar or fuzzy match for this string)

magicalhippo• 2 years ago

I switched to using DuckDuckGo primarily, and it's now fuzzy by default. It returns lots of results that doesn't contain more than the most generic word in my query, and I always get this one hit for a completely unrelated site just because it has the name of my town in the headline.

Sure you can force it by using "foobar" but yeah, searching the web isn't what it used to be.

neilv2• 2 years ago

I think this article would work better if it were written entirely like textbook traditional investigative journalism. And less like the modern TV opinion personality, or the random strong-opinion Web comments in which many of the rest of us (including myself) indulge.

romanhn7• 2 years ago

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

Nevermark3• 2 years ago

Hyperbole that is quite obviously hyperbole is a well accepted literary device. It is a form of highlight via creative exaggeration of non-critical points, that is transparent, not deceptive, in service of making serious adjacent points. [0]

The point here is to highlight the actually cartoonish level of dysfunction and damage with an intentionally cartoonish flourish.

The "villian" in this case can be colorfully interpreted as the real world isomorphism of a mustache stroking, side sneering perpetrator, from any usually fictional world-stakes good vs. evil story.

Intentional exaggeration also communicates a bit of self-awareness, that gives heavy crisis alarms more credibility. The author's levity demonstrates a higher level awareness and humility, by making fun of his own extraordinarily serious thesis.

Finally: gallows humor. Add humor when talking about depressing things to relieve the anxiety that often inhibits discussion and contemplation of difficult topics.

[0] See famous "juvenile" writer Mark Twain.

akaij2• 2 years ago

I thought it was a very good description. The person mentioned is responsible for turning one of the most important pieces of software used by billions, into user-hostile experiences that's better for only a few, including himself, just for profits.

joenot443• 2 years ago

You don’t find it to be succinct? It’s certainly pejorative, but in four words it explains quite nicely how the author feels about Raghaven in a way most engineers can probably relate to. If he’d said “engineer who no longer builds but leverages their past technical background to instead succeed in a management role, often to the detriment of their past engineering peers” it would roughly get the same idea across, it’s just a chore to read.

Personally I don’t mind that sort of colloquial flare, it reads like I’m talking with a real person rather than a design document.

phyzome• 2 years ago

"Class traitor" isn't a juvenile insult. It has a fairly well-defined meaning and describes a set of problematic behaviors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_traitor

Are you saying that it's an incorrect description, or are you just generally against accusing people of things?

TechDebtDevin4• 2 years ago

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.

neilv2• 2 years ago

and gives us a name to actually blame.

Understanding the dynamics is great, and we can learn from that, and apply it to other situations.

As for who to blame for something a company does, shouldn't outsiders blame the entire company? That's our interface, and also how we can hold the company accountable for its collective behavior.

It's also a defense against scapegoating: it wasn't just one person who made a unilateral decision, and everyone else -- up to and including the board, as well as down the tree, to those who knew and could walk and/or whistleblow -- was totally powerless. The company as an entity is responsible, and a lot of individuals were key or complicit.

xkbarkar• 2 years ago

Yeah I agree. The personal tone makes it clear that this is the authors’ opinion and not unbiased fact. I thoroughly enjoyed the article and the writing style. Excellent job.

cbsmith11• 2 years ago

...and gives us a name to actually blame.

I'm not sure that scapegoating makes the characterization of the article any better.

atleast this guy has given us good information and context to understand Googles decline.

The style of the article gives good reason to think that the context & information is selectively provided.

And of course, it's more entertaining when people are called out.

Yup.

taco_emoji3• 2 years ago

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

its_ethan2• 2 years ago

And your criticism of him is what? Encourage more sensationalism? Because there's so much evidence of that being such good and healthy way for journalism/news to operate?

Anotheroneagain2• 2 years ago

I think that you unintentionally hit the core of why things are turning into crap.

saganus2• 2 years ago

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?

kelnos6• 2 years ago

Aside from the annoying pop-up, I didn't actually notice the other calls to subscribe.

It's a bit of an unfortunate situation for the author, if any reasonable number of people are like me. If I didn't notice the less-intrusive efforts to get me to subscribe, and when I see the intrusive one (the modal pop-up), it makes me less likely to want to subscribe... oof.

I think the theoretical ideal from the reader's standpoint is that there's just one call to subscribe, at the very end, the idea being that if you can't make it to the end of the article, you probably aren't going to subscribe anyway.

And yet so many sites still do the modal pop-up that interrupts you while you're reading. So clearly they must work, at least well enough to get people to sign up? Then again, I do wonder how many people are so turned off by those pop-ups, people who would have subscribed, but decide not to?

mrandish• 2 years ago

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.

kelnos6• 2 years ago

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.

davidgerard7• 2 years ago

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

cbsmith11• 2 years ago

That's the first question that came to mind while reading the article. Many of the possible answers that came to mind did nothing to improve my perception of the article.

cbsmith11• 2 years ago

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).

lo_fye2• 2 years ago

The thing I love about this story is that it demonstrates that even in a global mega-organization, a single person can make a huge difference, for better (Gomes) or for worse (Raghavan).

resource_waste3• 2 years ago

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.

tigen• 2 years ago

I'm not sure why people buy into the idea of this being down to an underling and not the CEO. Generally, the way this type of management structure works, it all heavily depends on the direction and incentives in place from the top down. And obviously it is not an underling that decides to replace someone with himself.

Now, let's look at how the corporate investors that hired that CEO operate.

t43562• 2 years ago

En**ifiers obviously do their best to penetrate any successful company. Is it a terrible surprise?

Shareholders probably want it - up to the point where the whole thing goes "poof" - then of course they don't want it.

vvpan2• 2 years ago

There is an article called "The man that killed X" for every X.

jwoq9118• 2 years ago

Including X (formerly called Twitter)

vvpan2• 2 years ago

Clever! I like it.

paxys• 2 years ago

Wow, weird that $300B+ in revenue is just showing up in Google's bank account every year even without an active search engine.

ethbr17• 2 years ago

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

ot11382• 2 years ago

Phenomenal article, very entertaining and aligns with my experience as a prominent search "outsider" (I founded the first search intelligence service back in 2004, which was later acquired by WPP. Do I have some stories).

The engineers at Google were wonderful to work with up to 2010. It was like a switch flipped mid-2011 and they became actively hostile to any third party efforts to monitor what they were doing. To put it another way, this would like NBC trying to sue Nielsen from gathering ratings data. Absurd.

Fortunately, the roadblocks thrown up against us were half-hearted ones and easily circumvented. Nevertheless, I had learned an important lesson about placing reliance for one's life work on a faceless mega tech corporation.

It was not soon after when Google eliminated "Don't Be Evil" from the mission statement. At least they were somewhat self aware, I suppose.

arromatic23• 2 years ago

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 ?

ot11382• 2 years ago

I don't know what caused it but I suspected at the time, and still do, that it was simply business people getting more involved in order to drive growth.

The hostility was simply this. One day we had a dedicated high level Google engineer helping us out and giving us guidance (and even special tags) to get the data we needed in a cost effective manner for both Google and us. The next day, he was gone and we received demands to know exactly what we were doing, why and even sensitive information about our business. After several months of such probing, we were summarily told that the access we had was revoked and that there was no recourse.

We circumvented by setting up thousands of unique IP addresses in 50+ countries throughout the world and pointing our spiders at Google through them (same as they do to everyone else). These were throttled to maintain very low usage rates and stay off the radar. We continually refilled our queues with untouched IPs in case any were ever blacklisted (which happened occasionally).

As for what we did, we sampled ads for every keyword under the sun, aggregated and analyzed them to find out what was working and what wasn't. This even led to methods for estimating advertiser budgets. At one point, we had virtually every Google advertiser and their ongoing monthly spend, keywords and ad copy in our database. Highly valuable to smart marketers who were looking for an edge.

ChuckMcM11• 2 years ago

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...

arromatic23• 2 years ago

How did the slashtag feature worked and what did it do ? It seems like a interesting concept but sadly the site is dead . What happened to it ?

maxerickson• 2 years ago

What is definition of dead? 15 years later they have huge majority of traffic share and lots of revenue.

bbor3• 2 years ago

A) I think it’s important to acknowledge that in many ways Google is actively trying to keep CPC low - what they care most about is total spend. A low CPC means an effective advertising network where interested consumers are efficiently targeted. Their position is complex thanks to their monopoly status over online advertising.

B) I don’t think it’s fair to characterize recent layoffs as some put-off collapse… criticize Google all you want for running a bad search engine, but right now they’re still dominant and search is the most effective advertising known to man. They’re raking in buckets of money: they had 54K employees on 01/01/2015, and 182K on 01/01/2024. Similarly, they made 66B in 2014, and 305B in 2023. The latest layoffs are them cleaning house and scaring their workers into compliance, not the death throes of a company in trouble — they’re barely a dent in the exponential graphs: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/numb...

iamthirsty3• 2 years ago

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.

Well in 2011 Google had just over 30k employees, and now they're doing "layoffs" with 180k+ in 2024. I don't think the layoffs mean much.

bane2• 2 years ago

ChuckMcM, I just wanted to say, I really appreciate the long view you bring to HN discussions. When you've been in tech for a few decades you start to see predictable patterns. History may not repeat, but it often rhymes.

ilrwbwrkhv• 2 years ago

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.

ChrisMarshallNY6• 2 years ago

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).

greg_V• 2 years ago

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.

specialist• 2 years ago

Exactly.

How much of (online) advertising is legit? Does any one know?

What would a "healthy" ad ecosystem look like? What should the the FTC (and advertisers) be working towards?

Eliminate any potential conflicts of interest? Bust up vertical integration (eg search & ads must remain separate companies)? Independent verification, as best able (eg like Nielsen does for ratings)?

Or maybe we determine (digital) ads based biz models are irredeemable, and we figure something else out.

underlipton5• 2 years ago

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.

wrs2• 2 years ago

This sounds an awful lot like the Boeing story, even including the “[engineering] class traitor” running the failing division.

mulmen5• 2 years ago

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.

wrs2• 2 years ago

Good point. But really it was Phil Condit who’s often regarded as kicking off the long slide to mediocrity with the McDonnell merger and move of Boeing HQ to Chicago. And he’s an engineer.

senderista2• 2 years ago

The MAX was exactly what their customers wanted.

cogman10• 2 years ago

Welch and Reagan teamed up to destroy the middle class.

TechDebtDevin4• 2 years ago

Will be interesting to see how this article is ranked on Google in a month or so ;). There might be a good reason why there aren't many search results about this guy, let alone anything negative.

ChrisMarshallNY6• 2 years ago

This was a good one: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-rot-economy/

itronitron• 2 years ago

I switched over to DDG sometime in 2017 or 2018, haven't used Google Search since.

NoMoreNicksLeft• 2 years ago

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.

arromatic23• 2 years ago

You explained DDG really well.DDG has so much potential to innovate with a sufficiently large user base and popularity .

terribleperson• 2 years ago

No, it was definitely that good. I remember finding a web page as a child (I think it was some weird webpage about medieval siege weaponry). Several years later, as a teenager, I wanted to find it again. With the right tweaking of search terms, I was able to find the same dang site. This actually happened more than once with multiple topics. If the site was still around, it was findable.

Now? Google search shows you what it wants you to, and damn anything else.

It's not entirely Google's fault - the web has gotten worse. But they take a large share of the blame, and I believe that their failures have played a role in making the web worse.

reshie• 2 years ago

DDG uses bing as it's backend.

throwaway5752• 2 years ago

I was prepared to really dislike this based on other commenters. If you are just reacting to others comments without reading the article, you are doing yourself a major disservice.

This reminded me very much - unpleasantly - about literature of the the McDonnell Douglas merger with Boeing.

dang5• 2 years ago

Anybody have a better title? 'Better' here means (1) less baity; (2) more accurate and neutral; and (3) preferably a representative phrase from the article itself.

"The man who killed Google Search" is too baity. See the 'unless' in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait"

Edit (since there are objections): I'm not taking a position for or against the article; I haven't read it. This is just bog-standard HN moderation regarding titles. I skimmed the article looking for a representative phrase and couldn't find one on first pass. That is rather unusual and when it happens I sometimes ask the community for help.

Edit 2: since there's no consensus on this I'm just going to reify that fact via the trailing-question-mark trick and call it a day.

guardiangod• 2 years ago

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.

dang5• 2 years ago

Since killing != killed, your comment already shows that the title is misleading.

taco_emoji3• 2 years ago

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

dang5• 2 years ago

Linkbait is about using tricks to grab attention rather than providing neutral information. Hyperbole is only one way to do that.

In this case "The man who" is a linkbait trope and "killed" is a sensational attention-grabby word. Composing them into "the man who killed" is linkbait.

netvarun• 2 years ago

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

grugq• 2 years ago

"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."

PaulDavisThe1st2• 2 years ago

"Prabhakar Raghavan is a bad man" :)

ljm• 2 years ago

The number of times his name is repetitively mentioned in the article makes me read it in the voice of Stewart Lee.

pjlegato• 2 years ago

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

Jasper_• 2 years ago

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?

davidgerard7• 2 years ago

This implies that posting a multi-paragraph comment on an article without bothering to read it, as dang did here, is the standard that HN should aspire to going forward.

dang5• 2 years ago

I didn't read it, I skimmed it. In this context, "read" means "read it enough to form my own view of the story"; "skim" means "read it enough for moderation purposes", such as title editing.

Moderation relies on the fact that those two are not the same. It is impossible to read all the articles; it is possible to skim enough of them to make moderation feasible.

(I did end up reading the OP out of curiosity later. My own view of the story is that I am pretty persuaded by it, but I don't like the personal attack aspect, which shows up as a mob dynamic in the comments here.)

joeyh2• 2 years ago

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

jubalfh• 2 years ago

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

nbittich• 2 years ago

Everytime I need to make a search on Google, I start to feel anxious, already convinced I'm not going to find anything useful about the problem I'm trying to solve. This often means I already tried everything else. It's a sad situation.a product shouldn't make you feel anxious.

hughesjj2• 2 years ago

Kagi ftw

imzadi2• 2 years ago

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

ianbutler2• 2 years ago

I find myself seeing nothing useful on Kagi, going to Google, seeing nothing useful, then asking ChatGPT and sometimes seeing something useful and othertimes being led on a wild goose chase. The general state of information retrieval seems bleak. Reddit is usually the solution for me, even on technical matters now.

Melatonic• 2 years ago

Agreed

ed_mercer• 2 years ago

Kagi seems to have their heads up their asses though. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40011314

gambiting• 2 years ago

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.

its_ethan2• 2 years ago

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.

wslh• 2 years ago

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.

resource_waste3• 2 years ago

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.

barfbagginus28• 2 years ago

I would like to report that this emotion and experience completely disappeared after I ported my business workstation over to Ubuntu budgie. Not only does my computer crash a whopping 80% less, but it also uses 30% less memory on average.

The main challenge was that I have to run my CAD software in a Windows VM. Ironically though the solution is more stable than running the CAD software on bare metal!

I can definitively say that being free of Microsoft anxiety is very sweet, and worth far more than any effort I had to spend to do the porting. It has radically improved my computing quality of life.

y04nn• 2 years ago

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.

o9aswjl5wj4• 2 years ago

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

barfbagginus28• 2 years ago

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.

emmelaich• 2 years ago

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.

rrrix15• 2 years ago

It's April 23rd, 2024, and I am still looking for a good, reliable, honest and simple search engine.

All I want to do is search.

No AI.

No ads.

No shopping.

Please don't "Answer my question." I enjoy doing my own original research, thanks.

I'm entirely willing - wanting even - to pay for it.

Currently Kagi has my $, but I'm saddened and frustrated that they're not even focused on Search, they're focused on AI[1] and t-shirts.

Amazingly, in 2024, there is still a market opportunity for a good search engine.

It can't really just be me, can it?

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22kagi%22+%22ai%22

autokad3• 2 years ago

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.

rideontime• 2 years ago

As somebody who uses "weird syntaxes" to create applications every day, I like having the option to use a specific language that offers the ability to more precisely describe the parameters of my search.

drowsspa• 2 years ago

Do you find Bing search to fit your needs or do you use something else? I honestly get tired of having to type so much to get it to find what I actually want. Most often I do prefer to just use my acquired Google-fu of speed reading results.

rrrix15• 2 years ago

Indeed, AI is immensely useful! I use it every day too.

However, it's been my experience that finding original works, perhaps that I can cite as a source, is somewhat difficult when the computer might confabulate both the content and the citations.

When LLMs get (much) better at doing math, law and medicine, I'll be much more likely to use them for those things.

autokad3• 2 years ago

@drowsspa

I don't use bing search, I use chatgpt and claude.

Here are some examples: after pasting hundreds of log lines of output from a failed build request, "why did this build fail?"

After pasting my last 3 workouts, "I am wondering if I am not putting enough muscle on my body / torso. Is this the case? if so, suggest me an exercise that utilizes body weight, dumbbells, or weighted exercise ball"

It suggested dumbbell pull over, so I asked "What weight should I start with for the dumbbell pull over?"

"say I want to go to the club and seem like I know what I am doing, how many dances should I know?"

"say I have a pandas series of numpy.ndarray, and I have an numpy.ndarray. I want to find the cosine distance between the numpy.ndarray and each of the items in the series"

"I made a notebook for non data scientists to follow and use, so I want to add lots of comments and mark down documentation." (paste notebook code) and it adds comments, doc strings, etc.

most of this stuff, using search as it is, is clunky. I would have to find weird ways to word what I am searching for to find results.

dandy232• 2 years ago

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

bradleyankrom• 2 years ago

Another upvote for Kagi. I've been using it for a few months and have been happy with the experience. They do have some AI features/interests, but I'm optimistic that the products they develop will serve me/users. So far, so good.

adishy• 2 years ago

Yes, and it's possible to turn off the AI / automated summary features if you don't like them as well.

ametrau5• 2 years ago

the quality isn't great. They also have my money though because who else is there?

dcminter• 2 years ago

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

1980phipsi• 2 years ago

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

mtsr• 2 years ago

I’m pretty sure that’s mostly down to who your VPN is having you share IPs with. It’s hard to limit unwanted traffic while not impacting regular VPN users.

More annoying to me is getting captchas constantly just for running a recursive dns resolver. That’s a normal piece of internet infrastructure and is well-behaved.

spaceman_20205• 2 years ago

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

freediver• 2 years ago

That is exactly what Kagi does. Kagi Small Web [1] was initiated to surface small personal websites in search engines again.

[1] https://blog.kagi.com/small-web

brtkdotse• 2 years ago

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

durandal1• 2 years ago

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

mulmen5• 2 years ago

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.

Eisenstein4• 2 years ago

Brave search works pretty well.

KaoruAoiShiho• 2 years ago

While entertaining it doesn't actually say anything about what the villain guy actually did, am I crazy? There's 2 serious charges he levied to google.

1. Ads look more like results.

2. Google results got more useless spam.

While 1 is kinda icky it's not that big of a deal, especially since I use an adblocker... and for 2 why does the author think this is the fault of google? Does shittier results increase in more people using google? I feel like it's the opposite, this doesn't seem right to me. Can it not just be that spammers and SEO freaks got more sophisticated and the problem got more challenging?

mjamesaustin• 2 years ago

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.

bitvoid2• 2 years ago

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.

TheCleric3• 2 years ago

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.

recursive• 2 years ago

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.

ReptileMan• 2 years ago

google is terrible lately - I can't find stuff I actually found years ago. Direct quotes are a joke. Everything is spam.

Lately I start my searches with chat gpt. Yaaay.

spaceman_20205• 2 years ago

I used “management consultant” there as a pejorative.

The road to death of capitalism will be paved by MBA degrees

gnicholas2• 2 years ago

Larry Page and Sergey Brin left Google in December 2019 (the same year as the Code Yellow fiasco), and while they remain as controlling shareholders, they clearly don’t give a shit about what “Google” means anymore.

Is he saying that the two of them together hold enough voting shares to completely control Google? Or is he using the phrase "controlling shareholders" in a different way?

bitvoid2• 2 years ago

IIRC, they combined have about 51% voting shares

gnicholas2• 2 years ago

Ah, looks like this is correct, at least as of 2022:

Even though such classes of shares were unusual in the tech industry, Brin and Page decided to copy the structure. In the case of Google (now Alphabet), A shares carry one vote, while B shares each carry 10 votes. Brin and Page between them own 51 percent of those B shares, giving them joint control of the company, even though they own less than 12 percent of its total shares.

1: https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/warren-buffett-google-serge...

justinbaker842• 2 years ago

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.

TheCleric3• 2 years ago

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

arromatic23• 2 years ago

Can Ben Gomes not launch a google rival or join bing ? I am sure msft will welcome him with open arm like they did Sam Altman . VSs will fund him without a second thought too .

srean2• 2 years ago

Ben Gomes' Google and Microsoft (even now) are different beasts in terms of internal politics and culture[0]. Successful Googlers need not be successful at Microsoft.

[0] To understand that, recall Vic Gundothra was an Microsoft export to Google. That's the kind of people that thrive in Microsoft.

ppeetteerr2• 2 years ago

What killed Google Search are the AI research papers that ultimately led to the rise of OpenAI

kreeben• 2 years ago

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.

ppeetteerr2• 2 years ago

Yeah, it's a lot of what you said but if it were the only player in town, then you'd have to deal with the monopoly. With AI, I can pull up a 70-99% accurate answer to my question (for many questions) and avoid the mess of ads altogether.

You can tell Alphabet is panicking because they started showing AI-generated answers to searches above the ads they serve.

flakiness• 2 years ago

Prabhakar Raghavan is an author of "Introduction to Information Retrieval", the definitive textbook on search at that time. This fact metaphorically depicts how sad this story is.

https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Information-Retrieval-Ch...

fudged71• 2 years ago

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

cbsmith11• 2 years ago

This fact metaphorically depicts how sad this story is.

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

relaxing• 2 years ago

His authorship is mentioned in the story.

Zuiii2• 2 years ago

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

anothername12• 2 years ago

Favorite bit:

very difficult to find much on Raghavan’s history [..] but from what I’ve gleaned, his expertise lies primarily in “failing up,”

senderista2• 2 years ago

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

VikingCoder2• 2 years ago

That doesn't mean his insights are correct, that he's a good leader, or that his efforts have been good for us users.

It's hard to find a bigger name in AI than Minsky, and he wrote one of the most influential books in Computer Science, which put a huge damper on all neutral network progress for decades... Arguably, that was a bad thing.

qintl55• 2 years ago

It is really nice to have someone to blame. And since things are going wrong (google results _are_ shitty) there is plenty going around. That said, just like no one person is responsible for the success of a company, no one person is responsible for its failure. This material is great for a movie, but not for critical thinking. It _is_ an entertaining read. My biggest problem with it is that the author seems to be contradicting his own principles. In his about page, he says "Be respectful.". That doesn't apply to him apparently. There is no way he asked this Raghavan dude if he wanted to comment for the article.

axus2• 2 years ago

Is Google desktop search dead? It's certainly been "shittier" but it's been adequate. Unlike Bing and Yahoo, there isn't clickbait fake news all over the screen. In a market where competitors are a bookmark away, it should be dead, but the big names seem to all collude on having a bad experience that makes more short-term money.

How is success being measured internally for "the man who killed Google Search"? Are profits for that piece moving on the right trajectory now in 2024?

Is Google really that hierarchical, that the decisions made by one person lead to all the problems? Maybe I'd believe it, but the article did not convince me that one guy was going against all efforts and better advice to tank the company.

isodev• 2 years ago

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”

axus2• 2 years ago

Yeah it's the pictures that really bother me, but you're not wrong. On the phone, I turn off "Discover".

cbsmith11• 2 years ago

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.

barfbagginus28• 2 years ago

Gpt4 driving the Bing tool is a better search engine than Google. First it can critique your objectives and turn them into effective search terms. Second it can filter through spam and avoid displaying it. Third it can reach into the contents of Target pages and actually extract the solution to the problem you're having.

These are all things that classic search engines had the opportunity to provide, but declined, in some cases due to the anti-competitive nature of reaching into pages and extracting answers, and in other cases because they would have reduced revenues.

dpkirchner7• 2 years ago

Google incentivizes low-quality content, content that well-intentioned and - designed search engines must deal with as well. At this point, we're seeing a garbage in/garbage out problem.

readyplayernull• 2 years ago

But do you know who has? Sundar Pichai, who previously worked at McKinsey — arguably the most morally abhorrent company that has ever existed, having played roles both in the 2008 financial crisis (where it encouraged banks to load up on debt and flawed mortgage-backed securities) and the ongoing opioid crisis, where it effectively advised Purdue Pharma on how to “growth hack” sales of Oxycontin.

That helps explain why Youtube scam campaings in different countries have been rampant for years while Youtube seems to look the other way.

chasd003• 2 years ago

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..

TechDebtDevin4• 2 years ago

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.

gverrilla5• 2 years ago

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

atif0894• 2 years ago

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.

wayne-li23• 2 years ago

Even though I agree with what the author is saying, the tone of this article is off putting to me. There are ways to call out people for being bad at their job without resorting to “class traitor” and “ratfucker”.

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.

scarfacedeb2• 2 years ago

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

sailfast2• 2 years ago

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.

etempleton• 2 years ago

I agree, but all of the alternatives are no better. Bing and Duck Duck Go are okay sometimes, but truly terrible other times. Google is consistently worse than it once was, but still better than the competition.

I know search is hard to do well, but if Google is truly floundering where is the startup that for it better and not just better for a very specific niche area, but truly better across the board?

juped• 2 years ago

Using a pejorative is not an "ad hominem".

barfbagginus28• 2 years ago

Calling someone a name is only an ad hominem fallacy if you try to use it as an argument. Here it's just used for style. Since the author has plenty of valid arguments, the name calling - which is not an argument - can be dismissed without weakening the actual argument.

In any case, it is not sound reasoning to reject the entirety of an argument just because one of the subclaims is not a valid argument. Doing so is the fallacy fallacy.

In this case, it's true that name calling weakens the credibility of the post for a general audience. But I contend that we might not need need to care. It only weakens the credibility of the post for members of the audience who make the fallacy fallacy, and refuse to evaluate the other claims on their own merits.

Convincing or not convincing such an audience might not be a concern to an author focused on truth, since such an audience is persuaded by fallacies.

Another thing is that if a person is actually a bad person, calling them bad names describing how they are a bad person is actually a true statement and not an argument "to the man". In this case the actual claim that is being argued is the fact of the person's moral insufficiency. Calling them the bad name is just the conclusion of an argument.

The main snafu of calling someone names as a stylistic or concluding aspect of an argument is that it lacks the decorum. If the debate forum requires respectful decorum then an argument can be disqualified on these grounds.

However in this case the forum is the author's own blog. The author has clearly chosen to speak to an audience that can evaluate arguments without being set back by insults - presumably an audience who is already very upset at Google and wants to know which person they should be upset at specifically. In this role, I found the insults were actually rather enjoyable and funny!

abtinf2• 2 years ago

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.

__loam3• 2 years ago

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.

posix_monad• 2 years ago

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

barfbagginus28• 2 years ago

Get information from llms after learning how to prompt them so that they won't hallucinate. Get information from searches by using llms to filter through the crap results. Get information from scientific papers on Google scholar and the arxiv. Get information from textbooks on the library Genesis. Get information from audiobooks on the audiobook Bay. Get information from peers trained in specific domains. Get information by reading code and documentation belonging to open source projects. Get information by performing experiments and trials. Get information by compiling reports and essays.

There are still many sources for information. And it's okay to work hard for it.

Good luck and Happy knowledge work.

devindotcom• 2 years ago

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.

Symbiote• 2 years ago

I had to look this up — I've never heard it used in Britain.

Ratfucking is an American slang term for behind the scenes (covert) political sabotage or dirty tricks, particularly pertaining to elections

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratfucking

wayne-li23• 2 years ago

TIL ratfucker actually means something relevant to the context of the article.

I think you worded my feelings much better than I did. This is a fiery op-ed from a personal blog and not polished journalism, so I should expect some individualism on writing tone.

eutropia3• 2 years ago

indeed. “ratfucker sam” is someone employed by billionaire Logan Roy in the hbo show succession:

Tom (to Greg): “You're asking about the moral character of a guy named Rat-Fucker Sam? He's a fucking piece of fucking shit!”

He’s a suit with a laptop sitting in Logan’s private jet.

deskr2• 2 years ago

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

deepakarora3• 2 years ago

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.

barfbagginus28• 2 years ago

The alternative is using tool enabled LLMs. GPT4 can drive Bing and filter results better than I can, and it hallucinates less than I do when pile driving through spam.

If you haven't read up on modern prompting strategies and still feel LLMs are stochastic parrots, you should read the foundational prompting papers (chain of thought, react, reflexion, toolformer, etc) and update your views about llms. They're very close to being the kind of autonomous search agents that the characters in classic cyberpunk novels would unleash on the real world to compile results.

It's actually made me excited about information retrieval again, for the first time in a decade. And the cool part is that autonomous search agents might become free and open source before the corporations manage to enshittify the experience.

Very fun times ahead!

distances• 2 years ago

Kagi is that alternative I suppose, at least for those who use search enough to pay for it. HN has a lot of testimonials on how good Kagi is.

3abiton• 2 years ago

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.

p3rls• 2 years ago

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.

A_D_E_P_T2• 2 years ago

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.

nullindividual• 2 years ago

refdesk.com was the very first website I visited in the earlish-90s. An awesome curated collection of websites.

...and looking at it today, it may not have changed much.

Thank fark for Fark.com and I guess refdesk.com. Classic Intertubes.

reddit has become nearly unreadable. If it isn't puns, bots, bots reposting puns, it's some awful "no shit" relationship advice thread, etc. (no, I don't have an account so yes, I do look at /r/all).

atif0894• 2 years ago

With so much AI generated spam being pushed on the web I think this is where we are headed towards in a couple of months/years.

Oh and not to mention https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

ninjaa2• 2 years ago

GNU has a really concept called the GNS for Gnu Naming System. And what it was was that each human or org would have their own tld directory, and we could navigate the web through other actors, and they could pass trust for zones on to others. So, for example, I could resolve the same page as somepage.ninjaa.site or someotherpage.adept.site. This way you could create a trusted internet by just trusting the published link tld directory of people & institutions you know.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9498 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUnet

ozr• 2 years ago

The awesome-X lists seem like a community attempt to do something similar.

freilanzer• 2 years ago

That sounds somewhat like Kagi, no?

gorbachev• 2 years ago

About that...

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

Just saw this article on my news feed.

overgard2• 2 years ago

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.

taf22• 2 years ago

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

chaostheory• 2 years ago

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.

godshatter2• 2 years ago

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.

xenago2• 2 years ago

Sometimes the tone is warranted. Destroying internet search for profit warrants scorn of all kinds. Zitron was too kind

yifanl6• 2 years ago

I think the blogpost spend a lot of time focusing on the uninteresting part. If it wasn't Raghavan, it'd just be someone else, Google (the corporation) wanted more search query metrics and Google is large enough to enforce its will, I doubt 2024 Google Search would be dramatically better if anyone else was promoted to Gomes' position (obviously, Gomes would have been kicked off regardless, because KPIs)

yifanl6• 2 years ago

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.

barfbagginus28• 2 years ago

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.

lazyeye• 2 years ago

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/23/google-search-boss-raghavan-...

bigjimmyk3• 2 years ago

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.

siliconc0w• 2 years ago

Hard to place the blame on a single person, though I do think a "management consultant wearing an engineer costume" captures Google's engineering leadership these days

A_D_E_P_T2• 2 years ago

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.

throwaway11460• 2 years ago

McKinsey has absolutely stellar engineers and engineering leadership in its internal software teams, it's a gift and joy to work with them. Not sure about the consulting side though.

wepple• 2 years ago

Are there known examples of ex-McKinsey employees that are generally considered a force for good in general?

rootusrootus• 2 years ago

One of my methods for slowing the deluge of ads is a DNS blackhole, and it's quite revealing when I use Google search. Most of the links, especially early in the results, are links that fail for me because they go to ad trackers.

Which is why I often do not rely on Google search any more.

JohnMakin• 2 years ago

What a turn from all the “Google search is good, actually” stuff that was popping up around here a ~year ago. I don’t think anyone can still say that with a straight face - it’s nearly an unusable product unless you are searching for a product you want to buy, and even then, not that great.

ametrau5• 2 years ago

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

underlipton5• 2 years ago

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

gregw134• 2 years ago

Ex-Google search engineer here (2019-2023). I know a lot of the veteran engineers were upset when Ben Gomes got shunted off. Probably the bigger change, from what I've heard, was losing Amit Singhal who led Search until 2016. Amit fought against creeping complexity. 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. My impression is that since he left complexity exploded, with every team launching as many deep learning projects as they can (just like every other large tech company has).

The problem though, is the older systems had obvious problems, while the newer systems have hidden bugs and conceptual issues which often don't show up in the metrics, and which compound over time as more complexity is layered on. For example: I found an off by 1 error deep in a formula from an old launch that has been reordering top results for 15% of queries since 2015. I handed it off when I left but have no idea whether anyone actually fixed it or not.

I wrote up all of the search bugs I was aware of in an internal document called "second page navboost", so if anyone working on search at Google reads this and needs a launch go check it out.

JohnFen2• 2 years ago

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.

potatolicious4• 2 years ago

It's also a good lesson for the new AI cycle we're in now. Often inserting ML subsystems into your broader system just makes it go from "deterministically but fixably bad" to "mysteriously and unfixably bad".

fuzztester10• 2 years ago

Same here with YouTube, assuming they use ML, which is likely.

They routinely give me brain-dead suggestions such as to watch a video I just watched today or yesterday, among other absurdities.

jokoon3• 2 years ago

that's not something ML people would like to hear

AlbertCory• 2 years ago

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

mike_hearn2• 2 years ago

He wasn't the only one. I built a couple of systems there integrated into the accounts system and "no ML" was an explicit upfront design decision. It was never regretted and although I'm sure they put ML in it these days, last I heard as of a few years ago was that at the core were still pages and pages of hand written logic.

I got nothing against ML in principle, but if the model doesn't do the right thing then you can just end up stuck. Also, it often burns a lot of resources to learn something that was obvious to human domain experts anyway. Plus the understandability issues.

zem• 2 years ago

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

banish-m43• 2 years ago

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.

barfbagginus28• 2 years ago

I formed a worker co-op - but it's just me! And I do CAD reverse engineering, nothing really life-giving.

I would love to join a co-op producing real human survival values in an open source way. Where would you suggest that I look for leads on that kind of organization?

delfinom2• 2 years ago

Problem is, worker owned co-ops would still require money to do anything even remotely competitive to existing businesses.

So... people go walk up for handouts from VCs....and the story begins lol.

godelski2• 2 years ago

What's odd to me is how everything is so metricized. Clearly over metricization is the downfall of any system that looks meritocratic. Due to the limitations of metrics and how they are often far easier to game than to reach through the intended means.

An example of this I see is how new leaders come in and hit hard to cut costs. But the previous leader did this (and the one before them) so the system/group/company is fairly lean already. So to get anywhere near similar reductions or cost savings it typically means cutting more than fat. Which it's clear that many big corps are not running with enough fat in the first place (you want some fat! You just don't want to be obese!). This seems to create a pattern that ends up being indistinguishable from "That worked! Let's not do that anymore."

dbingham• 2 years ago

The hard part about starting worker owned co-ops is financing. We need good financing systems for them. People/firms who are willing to give loans for a reasonable interest, but on the scale of equity investment in tech start ups.

jaynate3• 2 years ago

I guess it depends on how much equity you own as to what is better (to your first paragraph), and how large the paycheck is (to the 2nd paragraph.

jokoon3• 2 years 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

ants_everywhere• 2 years ago

I definitely think the ML search results are much worse. But complexity or not, strategically it's an advantage for the company to use ML in production over a long period of time so they can develop organizational expertise in it.

It would have been a worse outcome for Google if they had stuck to their no ML stance and then had Bing take over search because they were a generation behind in technology.

1024core2• 2 years ago

most engineers are drawn to complexity like moth to fire

Unfortunately, Google evaluates employees by the complexity of their work. "Demonstrates complexity" is a checkbox on promo packets, from what I've heard.

Naturally, every engineer will try to over-complicate things just so they can get the raises and promos. You get what you value.

nothercastle2• 2 years ago

Engineers love simplicity but management hates it and won’t promote people that strive towards it. A simple system is the most complex system to design.

barbariangrunge2• 2 years ago

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?

baryphonic4• 2 years ago

What I don't understand about this explanation is that Google's results are abysmal compared to e.g. DuckDuckGo or even Brave search. (I haven't tried Kagi, but people here rave about it as well.) Sure, all the SEO is targeting googlebot, but Google has by far more resources to mitigate SEO spam than just about anyone else. If this is the full explanation, couldn't Google just copy the strategies the (much) smaller rivals are using?

codegladiator• 2 years ago

spam didn't kill search. Google willingness to promote spam for ads killed Google. Google is not search.

madcoderme• 2 years ago

It's like "Do some SEO magic and Tada!"

And who forgot the recent Reddit story.

re5i5tor• 2 years ago

Hard disagree. As another reply mentions, just compare the alternatives such as Kagi that aren’t breaking search by pursuing ad growth.

freetinker• 2 years ago

A bit chicken-and-egg. Another perspective: Google’s system incentivizes SEO spam.

Search for a while hasn’t been about searching the web as much as it has been about commerce. It taps commercial intent and serves ads. It is now an ad engine; no longer a search engine.

choppaface• 2 years ago

SEO Spam didn't kill search so much as Google failed to retain Matt Cutts or replicate his community involvement https://www.searchenginejournal.com/matt-cutts-resigns-googl...

haspok• 2 years ago

I don't know, but Youtube seems to have a more solid algorithm. I'm typically not subscribed to any channel, yet the content I want to watch does find me reasonably well. Of course, heavily promoted material also, but I just click "not interested in channel" and it disappears for a while. And I still get some meaningful recommendations if I watch a video in a certain topic. Youtube has its problems, of course, but in the end I can't complain.

underdeserver• 2 years ago

I've heard this argument again and again, but I never see any explanation as to why SEO is suddenly in the lead in this cat-and-mouse game. They were trying ever since Google got 90%+ market share.

I think it's more likely that Google stopped really caring.

willvarfar• 2 years ago

I think a case can be made that the spam problem can be traced all the way back to Google buying Doubleclick.

Its really easy to spot the crap websites that are scaping content-creating websites ... because they monetize by adding ads.

If Google was _only_ selling ads on the search results page, then it could promote websites that are sans ads.

Instead, it is incentivised to push users to websites that contain ads, because it also makes money there.

And that means scraping other sites to slap your ads onto them can be very profitable for the scammers.

Ambolia• 2 years ago

For me what killed search was 2016, after that year if some search term is "hot news" it becomes impossible to learn anything about it that wasn't published in the last week and you just get the same headline repeated 20 times in slightly different wording about it.

After that I only use search for technical problems, and mouth to mouth or specific authors for everything else.

raxxorraxor• 2 years ago

Machine learning is probably as much or even more susceptible to SEO spam.

Problem is that the rules of search engines created the dubious field of SEO in the first place. They are not entirely the innocent victim here.

Arcane and intransparent measures get you ahead. So arcane that you instantly see that it does not correspond with quality content at all, which evidently leads to a poor result.

I wish there was an option to hide every commercial news or entertainment outlet completely. Those are of course in on SEO for financial reaesons.

deepGem• 2 years ago

This explodes for search terms dealing with questions related to bugs or issues or how to dos. Almost all top results are YT videos, each of which will follow the same pattern. First 10 secs garbage followed by request for subscribe and/or sponsorship content then followed by what you want.

jesuslop• 2 years ago

Much agreed, and this is prompting me to experiment with other search engines to see if they cut off also the interesting humans sites. With todays google I feel herded.

eitland3• 2 years ago

Most of the problems I complain about are not related to SEO spam but to Google including sites that does not contain my search terms anywhere despite my use of doublequotes and the verbatim operator.

As for SEO spam a huge chunk of it would have disappeared I think if Google had created the much requested personal blacklist that we used to ask them for.

It was always "actually much harder than anyone of you who don't work here can imagine for reasons we cannot tell or you cannot understand" or something like that problem, but bootstraped Kagi managed to do it - and their results are so much better that I don't usually need it.

winternett• 2 years ago

These search companies should have hired moderators to manually browse results and tag them based on keywords instead of leaving tagging up to content and info creators. The entire results game became fixated on trending topics and SEO spam that it became a game of insider trick trading, that's what makes results everywhere so terrible now.

In a bid for attention, only the fraudsters are winning, well, the platforms are winning lots of money from selling advertising, I guess that's why they're perfectly fine with not fixing results and ranking for many years now. I'm not sure there is a way back to real relevance now, there's no incentive for these large companies to fix things, and the public has already become used to the gamified system to go back to behaving themselves.

baryphonic4• 2 years ago

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?

mrkeen2• 2 years ago

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

Are there any humans out there who want to write a traditional forward-algorithm to tell me which result is better?

datadeft2• 2 years ago

You do not need to. Counting how many links are pointing to each document is sufficient if you know how long that link existed (spammers link creation time distribution is widely differnt to natural link creation times, and many other details that you can use to filter out spammers)

etc-hosts3• 2 years ago

For a few months last year every time I searched for information about a package related to software available in homebrew, the first few results were to a site that clearly just had crawled all of the links in homebrew, and templated out a site of links corresponding to each package name. and thats about it. It would have been nice if the generated pages contained any useful information, but alas it did not.

There's got to be a better way.

skyfallsin• 2 years ago

@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.

snewman• 2 years ago

Guessing: perhaps this means, if someone needs credit for shepherding an improvement to search quality into production, here is a set of known improvements waiting for someone to take ownership.

eitally5• 2 years ago

I was there from 2015-2023 and, although I didn't work in Search, I remember a lot of the bigger initiatives designed at improving Search for users, like the project to add cards for the top 500 most commonly searched medical terms/conditions, using content from Mayo and custom contracted digital art (for an example, here's a sample link: https://www.google.com/search?q=acl+tear ). There were a lot of things like this going on at any point in time, and it was terrific to see. Then I discovered the manually curated internal knowledge graph, that even included many-language i19n. And then that it was possible for any googler to suggest updates/changes/additions.

Point being, there's a lot of amazing stuff that folks on the outside never would have seen, and it would be a shame for beancounters to ruin it all with decisions actively not "respecting the user".

darrenoc2• 2 years ago

That amazing internal knowledge graph you're talking about folks on the outside never seeing? That is very ironic because that knowledge graph used to be Freebase.com and a lot of the data came from the open data community who volunteered their efforts and expertise. Then Google bought Metaweb and shut down Freebase.

influx• 2 years ago

What are xooglers experience with Code [Yellow|Red]? I've seen xooglers implement them in other companies and it was a total cluster fuck with some of the most aggressive bullshit from VP level execs yelling at ICs and pushing questionable technical decisions, along with extreme overwork that was all justified because "Code RED!!!!"

temporarely4• 2 years ago

So Yahoo sent a guy to Google search and he killed it, and a Google sent a gal to Yahoo to kill it.

a computer scientist class traitor

Loved this. In addition to this class traitors, we also had (much earlier) counter-revolutionaries that sold us a Tech Utopia in 90s and then promptly setup camp in FANGS to give us the Surveillance Tech Dystopia.

[my tongue is somewhat lodged in my cheek here but only a bit]

barfbagginus28• 2 years ago

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

pphysch• 2 years ago

Countdown to when Google releases a Kagi competitor "Premium Search" that bundles ad-free, configurable Search with their SOTA Gemini model...

utopcell• 2 years ago

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

dpkirchner7• 2 years ago

They also offered an official way to exclude domains from results.

deskr2• 2 years ago

I think what Google doesn't realise is that they're driving around with an open container of petrol slushing around on the floor. It just needs a spark (from a new competitor) and fire is real.

jdofaz• 2 years ago

Reminds me of when the mostly loved Google Inbox was killed because people spent less time in gmail

next_xibalba• 2 years ago

I see this as nothing but good news (if it's all true). Unlike in the early 2000s, there are plenty of viable alternatives to Google. The dawn of generative AI could spawn even more. So this means Google is intentionally undermining their competitive advantage at a moment when they least should. Hurray! Either Google will course correct and give us great search or it will bleed users to the likes of Bing, Startpage, Duck Duck Go, Perplexity, etc. etc.

jesprenj• 2 years ago

I usually add before:2019 to google search queries to remove a lot of LLM generated articles.

eatsyourtacos• 2 years ago

ChatGPT is my default now basically.. almost anything I search for is technical in nature and it gives me the proper result almost all the time. Even if it's setting up a dedicated server for a game etc

breck• 2 years ago

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.

barfbagginus28• 2 years ago

Please make sure to evangelize that a little bit... There's something weird going on where some people "get it" about how to use llm's effectively, while other people can't get past the idea that they are stochastic parrots on LSD.

I believe that this is because getting good results out of llm's requires greater critical thinking and writing abilities than simply composing keywords for search. Unless we support and educate our peers here there's the risk that many of them could be left behind in a way that could be harsher than what happened to people who couldn't "just Google it".

I'm considering that I might be over inflating the urgency here. But I increasingly feel we may have a duty to educate our peers here, or risk letting them fall behind to their own and our own detriment.

metabagel2• 2 years ago

Caveat - it can't provide current information.

aws_ls• 2 years ago

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.

tinyhouse• 2 years ago

I like the article and I share the same sentiment. However, let's not assume these people care about Google search, cause most of them don't. They care about making the most money they can, until the next thing.

tired_and_awake• 2 years ago

I'm dying here, from the article;

What about Raghavan’s career made this feel right? How has nobody connected these dots before and said something? Am I insane?

Yeah spend any amount of time in tech and you will learn this feeling well. There should be some long German word that describes it.

How many acquaintances do I know that have sold their useless startups for 10s of millions. Others that are promoted well past the Peter Principal into positions that have them leading thousands - and lacking the basic skills or empathy needed to understand what it is their orgs do.

This can either make you bitter and burn out... Or you can let it go. The universe doesn't owe us fairness. Ask the seal being played with by an Orca before being torn to shreds how it feels about fairness.

Go enjoy life friends. Luck dominates so much of what is perceived as success. There are more important things to worry about.

rhelz• 2 years ago

Raghavan's story is an inspiration. He learned the hard way that you are either growing or you are dying, and if revenue declines, you need to turn it around prontissimo, or hope you find the next profit center in time. It's the comeback story of the generation.

Don't forget, the purpose of corporations is to make money for their owners. It does no good to say that delighting customers or providing the best product will make the most money in the long run--clearly, that is not the case.

stevage2• 2 years ago

I thoroughly recommend everyone switch their default browser search to something else, perhaps kagi or duckduckgo. Give it a month. You can always switch back if you don't like it.

overgard2• 2 years ago

I switched to DuckDuckGo recently, partially because google results don't seem very good anymore, but also very much because of how hostile it is towards VPNs. I like having a VPN when I'm travelling or on a public wifi as a sensible precaution, but Google constantly forces me through irritating "prove you're human" puzzles.

nothrowaways• 2 years ago

RIP

miohtama• 2 years ago

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.

So it is true that the quality of Google search results have decreased, and the cause is that they wanted more ad revenue and they achieved this by making the user to navigate through spammy results?

tyingq• 2 years ago

What's sort of interesting about that catalyst of “steady weakness in the daily numbers” is that it didn't equate to a plateau, decline, etc...

It was that the ad dollars weren't, for the umpteenth time, exceeding YoY growth that far exceeded the growth in eyeballs watching/seeing ads. They were just somewhat exceeding the already meteoric growth of the web in general.

Google had unrealistic expectations in sustaining that growth rate because they started off with no ads, then very unintrusive ads, then somewhat instrusive, and so on. And, at the same time, leaps in A/B testing, targeting, bidding, and so on.

Until there was no more space on the visible page for ads, and little more to optimize for bids, views, targeting, etc. Then the growth fell back from crazy high to just amazingly high, and everyone lost their minds. Like it was a surprise.

VikingCoder2• 2 years ago

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.

yifanl6• 2 years ago

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.

Rapzid• 2 years ago

I could swear Google search got meaningfully worse over the weekend or late last week. I Was using phrases I used before to locate stuff and not finding it. Asking questions in the search which used to return more reddit and blog results; nothing in the search results seem to reflect my question. Also, it was switching to shopping results UI just on its own.

Was driving me insane.

Ozzie_osman• 2 years ago

Meanwhile, Google stock approaches an all-time high at around 160 / share.

globalnode• 2 years ago

what do you use for search instead of google/bing? is ddg the best of the worst?

jeremyjh• 2 years ago

Kagi is better.

b800h• 2 years ago

I'd be pretty upset if details about my career were documented so soon afterwards, probably while I was still in work. This seems like a really poor show to me. Describing someone as a "class traitor"? Seriously, what the heck?

davidgerard7• 2 years ago

Will no one think of the poor smol boy executive who makes eight figures and is being held responsible for his actions? The cruelty!

Willish422• 2 years ago

And in my next newsletter, I'm going to walk you through how a very specific kind of managerial mindset has poisoned Silicon Valley, making career failures unfathomably rich while your favorite tech products decay.

I look forward to this one as somebody with a personally vested interest!

More seriously, Ed Zitron's podcast Better Offline is great for those who enjoyed this article. I love his opinionated perspective even when I don't wholesale agree (though in this case I do), and I find him a breath of fresh air in tech journalism. I work in a ... similar company and find his perspective to be spot on about growth hacking degrading product health over time, and the baffling track record of many an SVP.

exodust4• 2 years ago

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!

dpkirchner7• 2 years ago

Musk is objectively a bad man, though. Remember when he called someone a "pedo guy" because that someone dares to disagree with his proposal for saving trapped people? Inexcusable.

sumanthvepa2• 2 years ago

Full Disclosure: Prabhakar Raghavan was my skip-level manager at Yahoo! and I'd known of him well before that, from my days at IBM Research.

The author says very few people knew who Raghavan was. Clearly he isn't a computer scientist. It is more an indication of the ignorance of the writer than anything else.

Raghavan's contributions to Computer Science and, Search in particular, which were made long before he joined Yahoo!, were word-class. That is the reason he was so sought after by search engine companies. His text book on Randomised Algorithms is a classic.

Calling Raghavan a 'McKinsey' consultant is just a pure ad-hominem attack. The purpose seems to be to vilify him by association. Which is utterly ironic considering that he never worked for them or was ever a 'consultant'

As for his contributions at Yahoo!, I don't think he had any significant influence on the management direction that company took. In my opinion, absolutely no one at Yahoo!, CEO downwards, had much control over their destiny.

Yahoo! was a clusterfck all around, with the primary problem being its utterly dysfunctional board, and unfortunate share ownership structure that made it beholden to the demands of Wall St, resulting in a parade of CEOs. Personnel churn was at such a high volume, that I, an individual contributor usually seven levels below the board, calculated that the average tenure of my leadership chain to the board changed once every fifteen days.

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

I have never worked for Google, but as an outsider, I don't disagree with the assessment, that Google Search was 'getting too close to money.' But to assign blame in this manner smells like a hit piece.

Managers, take their marching order from their bosses, ultimately this is the board of the company. If the board feels the need for revenue growth, no manager, CEO included has the power to resist too much. They advise against it, but in the end they will either need to to their biding or be fired.

Edited for typos and grammatical errors.

lupire2• 2 years ago

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.

andrewflnr• 2 years ago

That is not a contradiction. There are lots of ways to "ruin" a company, making all the people who interact with it more miserable, while still making that company "successful".

itsdrewmiller• 2 years ago

There are plenty more reasons than that - check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company#Controver... for more info.

gr__or• 2 years ago

The general critique is: McKinsey over-optimizes on short term profitability over meaningful, longer term, harder-to-measure values. Your framing drops the most important aspect of the critique to make it sound contradictory.

TrackerFF2• 2 years ago

Just a side note

The main criticisms of McKinsey (and strategy/management consulting firms in general) are:

1) They can (and have/will) consult both sides, even though there's a massive conflict of interest. It's like having the same law firm represent both plaintiff and defendant. This is the most egregious of the bunch.

2) They have deep ties with governments and the private sector, and leverage this bridge to reach their goals. Their alumni network is what keep propelling the firm.

3) They optimize for profits and recurring business (which any business does, so you can't really blame them for that...but:), and will not shy away from giving their clients morally or ethically questionable advices. This one ties back to (1).

Imagine if McKinsey is consulting Google on how to increase revenues related to customer data, while also consulting government regulators on how to deal with customer data privacy - with their own (McK) motives being maximum future revenue and extending their influence.

ryeights• 2 years ago

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.

cbsmith11• 2 years ago

He called Raghavan a "management consultant", whilst acknowledging that he never was a management consultant. It's slinging pejorative nonsense labels.

sumanthvepa2• 2 years ago

So why needlessly call him a management consultant?

Yes it is a stretch to say he had much influence. There reason is very simple. Yahoo! was in its death throes. The core products were not bringing in revenue, and it was in the middle of multiple hostile takeover attacks by various private equity players. First it was a hostile offer from Microsoft, a hostile take over effort by Carl Icahn, and then a finally yet another, hostile take over (I forget the name of the last raider)

When there is so much uncertainty, and the fight is for mere survival, strategy has no meaning. You don't strategize, when someone is shooting you in the head.

eutropia3• 2 years ago

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.

TrackerFF2• 2 years ago

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.

DanielHB4• 2 years ago

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.

gofreddygo• 2 years ago

I can't sign up to blaming 1 person for a company's failure.

But people need a reason however wrong and a symbol for it. Article is painting growth-hacking as "the" reason for Google's failure and a single person as a symbol. a spineless management puppet sheepskinned as a scientist. Classic expose material.

I don't agree with the article's emotion or conclusions but I can't deny that Google is in a bad, bad place. Founders don't care. User's being preyed on. No one to fight for the user's interests. Parasites eating it up feeding on whatever's left. employees and users expressing betrayal and abuse. In the headlines for all the wrong reasons.

And for the world, a loss. Almost like a good friend gone the way of drug addiction.

xenago2• 2 years ago

A lot of words to say 'I think it's ok to follow orders blindly and torch valuable technologies'. Gomes had principles, you and Raghavan do not.

w10-1• 2 years ago

Leaving aside the tone and accepting the facts at face value, this only shows that Prabhakar was in charge when search failed at Yahoo and then at Google.

Business and technical decisions are often made by incompetent people with adverse incentives; they are sustained in their decisions and positions by larger forces and by avoiding consequences. Attacking specific (useful) idiots is less helpful than identifying how the organization evolved away from good vetting, good feedback, and incentive alignment -- the "eternal vigilance" required for the freedom to create at scale.

Please look past the heroes and villains to identify what's enabling them, particularly if you have access and care about the organization or its impacts.

joeyh2• 2 years ago

holy gratuitous question mark hackernewsman

eric_khun• 2 years ago

I guess 2024, revenue is still prioritized over search quality? Anyone found better alternative to Google Search, even paid?

taf22• 2 years ago

ChatGPT is much better…

Zuiii2• 2 years ago

hell, even local LLMs are better - and I'm talking original mixral-quality here, not the capable models that were released a few days ago.

My workflow now for "Google-grade" queries is to query a LLM and then use search to verify and look up additional information. DDG-grade queries still get handled by duckduckgo.

Google looks like it's circling the drain from where I'm standing.

Rastonbury• 2 years ago

Timeline of 2019 matches the trend for "why is search so bad" on Google trends, I had forgotten when I felt search had been enshittified

istillwritecode• 2 years ago

I know Prabhakar. He was my manager at Google Research and he tried to recruit me to Yahoo in 2005, but I went to Google instead. This article stinks of hatred and misunderstanding about how Google works. It's possible that Prabhakar bears some responsibility for the decline of search experience, but it sounds over the top to assign all blame to him as a manager.

eutropia3• 2 years ago

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.

sumedh• 2 years ago

assign all blame to him as a manager.

Can you share who are the others we can blame?

sn41• 2 years ago

Great article. But the author can't be serious about no one knowing who Prabhakar Raghavan is. He is, for instance, the co-author of the definitive text on randomized algorithms [Motwani and Raghavan]. He has also been a well-respected database researcher for many years.

In a previous avatar, Raghavan was a pure theoretical computer scientist. As a student, he won the best student paper in FOCS, the Machtey award, which is kind of a big deal. The work was related to randomized rounding, which is a bread-and-butter technique for LP relaxation approaches to integer optimization, similar to knapsack problems.

This is not to defend any bad decisions he may have made at Google and Yahoo, but to make him an anonymous clueless corporate honcho who is good only at scheming and wrecking companies is bizarre. All this information, moreover, is available on Wikipedia and (cough) Google scholar.

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=FtMADIMAAAAJ&hl=en...

tflol• 2 years ago

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

trogdor3• 2 years ago

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.

zild3d• 2 years ago

must not have turned up in his google results

slingnow• 2 years ago

But the author can't be serious about no one knowing who Prabhakar Raghavan is. He is, for instance, the co-author of the definitive text on randomized algorithms [Motwani and Raghavan]. He has also been a well-respected database researcher for many years.

Surely YOU can't be serious. The author was very clearly comparing this guy to much more famous and heavily derided figures like Musk, Zuckerberg, etc. I don't think co-authoring a text on randomized algorithms gets you the same notoriety as being the head of Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter...

betageek• 2 years ago

This isn't an article for computer scientists, and I think he covers this pretty well:

"While Levy calls him a “world-class computer scientist who has authored definitive texts in the field,” he also describes Raghavan as “choosing a management track,” which definitely tracks with everything I’ve found about him."

"Despite his history as a true computer scientist with actual academic credentials, Raghavan chose to bulldoze actual workers and replace them with toadies that would make Google more profitable and less useful to the world at large."

tzury• 2 years ago

The man who killed Google .* is its CEO.

- Search

- Maps

- Chat/Calls/Meetings

To name a few. Letting PMs making cardinal decisions, contradict with others, then renaming and rebranding same functionality shutting down popular products on the way.

Google cloud is a sad example of how a better product failed to take over the market, despite the fact the buyers are tech savvy and appreciate great technology.

Waymo is a complete failure, it runs, indeed, but it takes roughly a million dollars per car for the equipment and assembly, so it’s easy to see its lack of sustainability.

At last, Transformers, an invention made in Google, became its biggest threat.

No unified strategy that combines and integrates all parties and plans, so it seems. And it is sad. Very very sad.

prerok• 2 years ago

What I can't wrap my head around is how these types of people manage to land such prestigious positions. How is it possible that we see people failing upwards across companies everywhere?

I mean, consider if you are looking for someone to maintain the building you live in and someone comes along and says all the nice things but you also know that the previous building they maintained burned down. In my view, it does not even matter what the reason was, it burned down. It could be their activities, their negligence, or even really something out of their hands, which is then anybody's guess whether they could have done something to prevent it.

So, how do they manage to get hired?

For a regular coding position, you have to have a good resume, do on-site meetings with the team, demonstrate the ability to code and be able to discuss complex design problems and sketch out solutions.

For these positions you only seem to have to know the right people and, probably, do a lot of lip service and you are in. Seems so broken it boggles the mind.

aurelien• 2 years ago

Google is evil!

jatins• 2 years ago

I think the HN crowd loves the attack on management consultant types.

However, this reads like an over exaggerated Fox news story, trying to create a hero vs villain narrative, written solely for the purpose of personal attack on a person

ineedaj0b• 2 years ago

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

emodendroket• 2 years ago

Well, if the whole thing rested on the shoulders of one person then it wasn't meant to last in the first place.

indus• 2 years ago

Why is no one working on an exclusion algorithm that excludes search results, such as:

- do not show me results that have advertising in it

- do not show me results whose content ranks high on SEO score

- do not show me results content hidden behind paywall or login

This was common during 2001 when toolbar or browser plugins would rerank the results based on several criteria--why is this no longer a thing now?

metabagel2• 2 years ago

Kagi gives you significant control over how their search engine works for you. One of the options is to search non-commercial sites.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html

pvdoom• 2 years ago

Its always the management consultants and finance guys that ruin things ...

karaokeyoga• 2 years ago

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

uptownfunk2• 2 years ago

Oh how I would love to read n-gate commentary on the comments here

davidgerard7• 2 years ago

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

nottorp• 2 years ago

Summary. Google killed Google search. End of story.

farmdve• 2 years ago

15 years ago I could search and get relevant results.

There is so much information from older forums and obscure blogs that will never get reached now. I use whatever method I can, Google, Bing, Copilot and ChatGPT to fill in the blanks.

bhawks• 2 years ago

The author is going for an easy narrative (Gomes good / Prabhakar bad) but that is not reality.

The Search PA had numerous efforts in the air beyond the search results page (SRP) that were consuming eng resources, exec attention and cannibalizing SRP traffic. Assistant was probably the biggest but there were others as well. Why does this matter? Well Google IS the SRP for most users and most of the alternatives (especially assistant) had no clear monetization endgame. To top it off the core platform and infrastructure underneath most of the search/assistant products were legacy dungeons that was poorly invested in and in desperate need of accountable leadership.

Prabhakar was right to call out that things were not going well in Search and Gomes was right that Ads and Search orgs were working from two vastly different perspectives. It is nostalgic to say that 'there was a reason the founders kept ads and search separate' but that statement was made when google was ridiculously smaller and you could rely on both sides having a rough idea of the direction to push forward to. By 2019 the orgs were huge and there were clear gaps that cross functional leadership had failed to fill.

Having worked for both leaders they had tremendous strengths and were trying to do things right despite their blindspots. I don't think any person would have done much better and when I left Google one of the big reasons was the company had grown beyond the abilities for it to be managed efficiently.

roydivision• 2 years ago

tl;dr - Growth will eventually kill everything.

As soon as someone asks "How can we make (more) money from this?" the thing is doomed.

AtNightWeCode• 2 years ago

Wow, that was a red pill. Everything suddenly makes sense. I always thought it only was machine learning that messed it up.

How to replace Google as default search in your browsers (tested on Windows).

Firefox -> Hamburger menu -> Settings -> Search

Chrome -> Kebab menu -> Hamburger menu -> Search engine

Edge -> Meatballs menu -> Privacy, search and services -> Services | Address bar and search

It says something about the state of UX in 2024 when the three major browsers have different icons for the app menu.

blippage• 2 years ago

The problem is, sites like DuckDuckGo and Gibiru are not much better.

There's loads and loads of paywall sites appearing near the top, which is pretty useless to me. There must surely be a market out there for a search engine that skips over this nonsense.

One feature that would be useful is a site filter; a link you can click to remove future results from the site.

dakial1• 2 years ago

Interesting story with a bit of non-sense ranting and random hate. Like Prabhakar Raghavan being an evil bean counter and a whole paragraph on McKinsey that has no connection to the story at all…

Karolis_K• 2 years ago

[...] the damage they’ve done to society. Because Google is the ultimate essential piece of online infrastructure, just like power lines and water mains are in the physical realm.

Just use Kagi search (or also probably there are some other alternatives) and at the end it will end up as a good thing for society.

edzitron3• 2 years ago

Hey all! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-man-that-destroyed... if you wanna hear this instead of read this, check out the podcast version.

devchix• 2 years ago

Now there's a Google response, and a response to that response. I love it when journalists bring the receipt. Is it even deniable that Google search is terrible now? Remember a time when there was not anything close to Google search, and Bing! was a joke? I never thought I would switch, but my daily driver now is Bing+CoPilot. I've run the same search on both Google and Bing and the results are mostly better on Bing, with the majority of crud still in the result of both, but the better, more relevant results, are on Bing.

Grazester• 2 years ago

Bing is still worse than Google for me.

The man who killed Google Search?

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