40 ms·

The man who killed Google Search?

• Rapzid 3y 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 3y ago
  Meanwhile, Google stock approaches an all-time high at around 160 / share.
• globalnode 3y ago
  what do you use for search instead of google/bing? is ddg the best of the worst?
  • jeremyjh 3y ago
    Kagi is better.
• b800h 3y 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?
  • davidgerard 3y 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!
• Willish42 3y 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.
  • exodust 3y 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!
    • dpkirchner 3y 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.
      • CatWChainsaw 3y ago
        On the bright side, he got away with it because he managed to sell a court on the idea that it was just an endearing nickname, so now we can call also Musk a pedo guy without fear of legal reprisal.
• sumanthvepa 3y 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.
  • xenago 3y 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.
  • lupire 3y 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.
• w10-1 3y 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.
• joeyh 3y ago
  holy gratuitous question mark hackernewsman
• eric_khun 3y ago
  I guess 2024, revenue is still prioritized over search quality? Anyone found better alternative to Google Search, even paid?
  • taf2 3y ago
    ChatGPT is much better…
    • Zuiii 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
  • eutropia 3y 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 3y ago
    > assign all blame to him as a manager. Can you share who are the others we can blame?
• sn41 3y 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&oi=sra https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=FtMADIMAAAAJ&hl=en...
  • tflol 3y 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
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • trogdor 3y 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 3y ago
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• tzury 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
  Google is evil!
• jatins 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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?
  • metabagel 3y 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 https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html
• pvdoom 3y ago
  Its always the management consultants and finance guys that ruin things ...
  • karaokeyoga 3y 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.
• uptownfunk 3y ago
  Oh how I would love to read n-gate commentary on the comments here
  • davidgerard 3y ago
    we've got techtakes at awful.systems, though it rarely goes in as hard as n-gate.
• nottorp 3y ago
  Summary. Google killed Google search. End of story.
• farmdve 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
• edzitron 3y ago
  Hey all! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-man-that-destroyed-google-search/id1730587238?i=1000653621646 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 3y 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 3y ago
    Bing is still worse than Google for me.
• swiftcoder 3y ago
  > a computer scientist class traitor that sided with the management consultancy sect Well if that ain't the purdiest turn of phrase
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • bsimpson 3y 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 3y ago
      How can one learn to do this?
      • gnarbarian 3y ago
        you need to put more stat points into speech.
      • dekhn 3y ago
        not from a jedi
      • dageshi 3y ago
        I think you dedicate your time to being an effective politician within the organisation rather than whatever it is you're actually meant to do.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • mrguyorama 3y ago
        Get born into a wealthier family
• autokad 3y ago
  [flagged]
• seanhunter 3y 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 3y 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.
  • edzitron 3y 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.
    • seanhunter 3y 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.
      • edzitron 3y ago
        No worries at all, happens to the best of us!
    • DaiPlusPlus 3y 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.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • Jtsummers 3y ago
• skilled 3y 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40067605 [1]: https://www.seroundtable.com/category/google-updates https://www.seroundtable.com/category/google-updates
  • ametrau 3y ago
    The quora ranking has to be one of the most morally bankrupt deals in modern history.
  • tgv 3y ago
    > People have been robbed of their livelihoods That's absurd. People gambled with their livelihood, some got rich, and most lost.
    • arromatic 3y 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.
    • skilled 3y 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.
• refulgentis 3y 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.
• shombaboor 3y ago
  Thinking about search ads over time, I had forgotten how ads were clearly marked in a blue box way back when.
  • Scoundreller 3y ago
    Now I just don’t see them at all!
  • lo_fye 3y 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 3y ago
      Friend! Get thee to https://ublockorigin.com/ https://ublockorigin.com/ ! You can thank me later!
      • acdha 3y ago
        This is how you get more spam masquerading as content. Ad blockers are useful but with billions of dollars on the line it’s not stable unless you switch to a company with a different business model.
      • mococa 3y ago
        Get it until the Manifesto V3.
        • kelnos 3y ago
          There's a simple solution to that: stop using Chrome. It is beyond me why so many people still use a web browser made by a company that wants nothing more than to track you and serve you ads. It's maybe excusable or at least understandable that so many average, non-technical users are still on Chrome, but anyone who knows anything about technology? Shame. (Yes, I know, some people actually need to use Chrome for whatever reason, but the vast majority of people who use it, do not actually need it, and would be fine using Firefox.)
• mistrial9 3y 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 3y ago
    Speaking of AI ruining Google search, https://bsky.app/profile/dahosek.bsky.social/post/3kqm25jwsf22l https://bsky.app/profile/dahosek.bsky.social/post/3kqm25jwsf...
    • arromatic 3y ago
      That's crazy.
      • applied_heat 3y ago
        The result is still available it appears to come from this page https://www.mapquest.com/travel/destinations/landmarks/places-of-interest/10-tallest-ferris-wheels.htm https://www.mapquest.com/travel/destinations/landmarks/place... Maybe that page is AI generated but Google is displaying a relevant although incorrect result
• fireflash38 3y 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.
  • paradox460 3y 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
  • ethbr1 3y 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
    • autokad 3y 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.
• arromatic 3y 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.
  • cynicalsecurity 3y ago
    Maybe they know that the AI is going to destroy Google anyway, same as any other search engine, so why bother.
  • riku_iki 3y ago
    they have much more money than they really need for everyday happiness.
    • arromatic 3y 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 .
      • riku_iki 3y ago
        I have impression they just enjoy their billioners lives, and do not have ambitions anymore. Also Larry has some sickness, so, maybe he has other life issues depending on his current condition.
        • arromatic 3y ago
          Do you have a link ?
          • riku_iki 3y ago
            https://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-was-diagnosed-with-hashimotos-thyroiditis-2013-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-was-diagnosed-wit...
• sidcool 3y ago
  Wow. This man seems to have a personal grudge against Raghavan. I knew people hate Pichai, but this brutal.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • ethbr1 3y 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.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • programjames 3y 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*.
  • imp0cat 3y ago
    Brutal? Yeah. But it's a great read.
• personalityson 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• janalsncm 3y 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.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• OnionBlender 3y 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 3y 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.
    • magicalhippo 3y 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.
    • rrrix1 3y 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)
• neilv 3y 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.
  • romanhn 3y ago
    Agreed. I struggled to keep going after "computer scientist class traitor". A very juvenile take that reflects poorly on the author, IMO.
    • phyzome 3y 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 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?
      • romanhn 3y ago
        It's a ridiculous term that promotes polarization and dumbs down the level of discourse. I have the same reaction to it as when I see "bootlicker" as applied to anyone who takes the company's side (or is in management in general). There's too much adversarial name-calling these days, and not enough seeking understanding.
        • oldkinglog 3y ago
          If you also take a wage, then you're also a class traitor by any reasonable definition, because denying the existence of class struggle only benefits capitalists - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_conflict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_conflict
          • romanhn 3y ago
• lo_fye 3y 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_waste 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• vvpan 3y ago
  There is an article called "The man that killed X" for every X.
  • jwoq9118 3y ago
    Including X (formerly called Twitter)
    • vvpan 3y ago
      Clever! I like it.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• paxys 3y ago
  Wow, weird that $300B+ in revenue is just showing up in Google's bank account every year even without an active search engine.
  • ethbr1 3y ago
    Why do you think they bought Android and built Chrome? :)
• ot1138 3y 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.
  • greg_V 3y 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-00144feab7de 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 3y 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.
  • 3y ago
• wrs 3y ago
  This sounds an awful lot like the Boeing story, even including the “[engineering] class traitor” running the failing division.
  • mulmen 3y 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.
    • wrs 3y 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.
      • mulmen 3y ago
        Fair point, thanks for the clarification.
    • senderista 3y ago
      The MAX was exactly what their customers wanted.
      • mulmen 3y ago
        Well, no, it isn’t. Nobody wanted a plane that suddenly turns into a lawn dart or falls apart in the air. The MAX was short term thinking on Boeing’s part. A foolish mistake in the aerospace industry. Boeing was a few years behind Airbus. Now they are a decade behind and tarnished their reputation.
        • 3y ago
• TechDebtDevin 3y 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.
  • ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
    This was a good one: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-rot-economy/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-rot-economy/
• itronitron 3y ago
  I switched over to DDG sometime in 2017 or 2018, haven't used Google Search since.
  • NoMoreNicksLeft 3y 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.
    • arromatic 3y ago
      You explained DDG really well.DDG has so much potential to innovate with a sufficiently large user base and popularity .
    • terribleperson 3y 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.
• throwaway5752 3y 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.
• dang 3y 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 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.
  • joeyh 3y ago
    about time to program websites to serve JWZ balls when HN tries these tricks to confuse its users IMHO
  • jubalfh 3y ago
    those who can, write. those who cannot, change the meaning of titles.
  • guardiangod 3y 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.
    • dang 3y ago
      Since killing != killed, your comment already shows that the title is misleading.
      • abtinf 3y ago
        The article is not arguing that the killing is still on going, but that google has already been killed. "Google" in the title should be read as "culture" or "the heart and soul of Google", not "Google the company". Possible better title: "The man who destroyed the soul of Google Search"
• nbittich 3y 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.
  • barfbagginus 3y 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 3y 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.
  • hughesjj 3y ago
    Kagi ftw
  • imzadi 3y ago
    I just recently switched to Kagi. It's worth paying a few bucks to get decent results.
• rrrix1 3y 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 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22kagi%22+%22ai%22
  • autokad 3y 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 3y 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.
      • smegger001 3y ago
        I would like it if they would actually respect the weird syntax consistently
    • drowsspa 3y 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.
    • rrrix1 3y ago
• barfard 3y ago
  [dead]
• KaoruAoiShiho 3y 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 3y 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.
  • bitvoid 3y 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.
  • TheCleric 3y 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.
• ReptileMan 3y 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_2020 3y ago
  > I used “management consultant” there as a pejorative. The road to death of capitalism will be paved by MBA degrees
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• gnicholas 3y 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?
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • bitvoid 3y ago
    IIRC, they combined have about 51% voting shares
    • gnicholas 3y 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-sergey-brin-larry-page-ipo-public-shares.html https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/warren-buffett-google-serge...
  • justinbaker84 3y 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.
  • TheCleric 3y ago
    According to this they own 86% of class B shares together: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/011516/top-5-google-shareholders-goog.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/011516/top-5-g...
• arromatic 3y 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 .
  • srean 3y 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.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
• ppeetteerr 3y ago
  What killed Google Search are the AI research papers that ultimately led to the rise of OpenAI
  • kreeben 3y 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.
    • ppeetteerr 3y 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.
• zzz999 3y ago
  [dead]
• flakiness 3y 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-Christopher-Manning/dp/0521865719 https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Information-Retrieval-Ch...
  • Zuiii 3y ago
    And yet, two search engines failed under his tenure. Maybe those who can't do should stick to teaching.
  • fudged71 3y ago
    I recently saved this book as it’s been recommended by a few people lately. Interesting
  • cbsmith 3y ago
    > This fact metaphorically depicts how sad this story is. It also highlights how selective the information & context provided in the story is.
    • relaxing 3y ago
      His authorship is mentioned in the story.
      • cbsmith 3y ago
        Yes, in the same sentence that says that his choosing the management track "definitely tracks with everything I’ve found about him".
• anothername12 3y 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,”
  • senderista 3y ago
    Yeah he only co-authored 2 highly influential CS textbooks when he wasn't failing upward
    • VikingCoder 3y 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.
      • VHRanger 3y ago
        Neural networks put a huge damper on themselves by being so compute hungry. They've always been there, it was just an inefficient way to do machine learning before around 2011 when GPUs started being good enough
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• qintl55 3y 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.
• axus 3y 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 3y 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”
    • axus 3y ago
      Yeah it's the pictures that really bother me, but you're not wrong. On the phone, I turn off "Discover".
  • cbsmith 3y 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.
    • barfbagginus 3y 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.
• readyplayernull 3y 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.
  • atif089 3y 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.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • chasd00 3y 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..
  • TechDebtDevin 3y 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.
  • gverrilla 3y 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.
• wayne-li2 3y 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.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • overgard 3y 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.
  • taf2 3y ago
    I append GitHub:) and then I switch back to chatgpt
  • chaostheory 3y 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.
  • godshatter 3y 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.
  • xenago 3y ago
• yifanl 3y 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)
  • yifanl 3y 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.
  • barfbagginus 3y 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 3y ago
  https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/23/google-search-boss-raghavan-warns-employees-of-new-operating-reality.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/23/google-search-boss-raghavan-...
  • bigjimmyk3 3y 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 3y 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_T 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
      Are there known examples of ex-McKinsey employees that are generally considered a force for good in general?
      • Nathanael_M 3y ago
        Peter Attia's book on longevity is really wonderful, as is his public discourse and research.
      • karaterobot 3y ago
        The best manager I ever had was an ex-McKinsey consultant. Extremely empathetic, super competent, good dude. I have not worked with him for years but still text him for advice, and he delivers. I suppose that there are people who left McKinsey because they thought they could make more money elsewhere, and people who left McKinsey because they realized they made a huge mistake working there.
      • sundalia 3y ago
• rootusrootus 3y 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 3y 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.
  • ametrau 3y ago
    Maybe even google no longer cares about shilling it (thinking it a loosing battle now).
  • underlipton 3y ago
    Speculation: they gave up astroturfing, because they've fully abandoned search now that AI is the future.
• gregw134 3y 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.
  • barbariangrunge 3y 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?
    • baryphonic 3y 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?
• bevekspldnw 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • rottencupcakes 3y ago
    I don't even want to know how much he got paid to ruin the most used product in the world.
    • bevekspldnw 3y ago
      Oh he did worse than that, far worse.
      • transcriptase 3y ago
        Do tell.
        • bevekspldnw 3y ago
          Very much wish I could.
          • orf 3y ago
            What does your message add to the discussion if you can’t even allude? Why even comment?
          • windowshopping 3y ago
            How is this comment useful then. make an anonymous account and share what you're talking about or don't bother saying stuff like this at all.
  • netvarun 3y ago
    "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes." "Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• influx 3y 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!!!!"
• nojvek 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    I doubt that any LLM replacement for google is going to be free. There might be a free tier but it will enshittify to uselessness much faster than google did because the operation will be much more expensive.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• temporarely 3y 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]
  • barfbagginus 3y 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 3y ago
  Countdown to when Google releases a Kagi competitor "Premium Search" that bundles ad-free, configurable Search with their SOTA Gemini model...
  • utopcell 3y ago
    Google has done this. They did offer a paid version that didn't have ads, but few actually used it.
    • dpkirchner 3y ago
      They also offered an official way to exclude domains from results.
• deskr 3y 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 3y ago
  Reminds me of when the mostly loved Google Inbox was killed because people spent less time in gmail
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• next_xibalba 3y 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 3y ago
  I usually add before:2019 to google search queries to remove a lot of LLM generated articles.
• eatsyourtacos 3y 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 3y 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.
    • barfbagginus 3y 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.
      • dsclough 3y ago
        Got any resources you’d recommend for learning to use llms in the way you describe?
  • metabagel 3y ago
    Caveat - it can't provide current information.
  • aws_ls 3y ago
• tinyhouse 3y 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 3y 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.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• rhelz 3y 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.
• stevage 3y 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.
• overgard 3y 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 3y ago
  RIP
• miohtama 3y 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 3y 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.
  • VikingCoder 3y 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.
  • yifanl 3y 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.