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In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo. I absolutely agree. One fundamental reason

by btilly 1y ago

In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo. I absolutely agree. One fundamental reason why Yahoo failed is that they prioritized short-term revenue from search partners, over long-term reputation. One of the key people behind that was Prabhakar Raghavan. And now, Prabhakar Raghavan is at Google. Where he has proceeded to make the same mistake, with the result that Google Search quality fell off of a cliff. If Google had been acquired by Yahoo, he would have been in a position to destroy Google earlier than he actually did. See https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ for more.

throwup238 1y ago
The HN discussion on that article has a lot of great commentary, including from some insiders: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
findingMeaning 1y ago
[flagged]
- crossroadsguy 1y ago
  > In hindu mythology, Raghavan (also Ravana [1]), who was blessed by gods and turned into villain by abducting Sita from lord Ram. WTH :D Raghavan != Ravana (Only relation is that they were on the opposite sides and that made pretty much the whole epic Ramayana) Raghavan comes from "Raghu" (another name for Ram). Raghavan kinda means "from Raghu" or so like "His descendants" or so. AFAIK
- amitheonlyone 1y ago
  Yea this is just pure bs. If you had taken to search for the name, you'd have found the wiki explaining the name's origin. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raghavan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raghavan Also,Raghavan is most probably his father's name and Prabhakar will be his given name.
  - ricardobayes 1y ago
    It's not unimaginable that a wonky google search or an AI summary led him to this.
  - gopkarthik 1y ago
    It is fitting that GP's username is `findingMeaning`.
antithesizer 1y ago
What do you do when you have a product whose value will inevitably drop in the medium/long-term? Squeeze every penny out of it while you still can. There is no solution to the SEO arms race, like there was no way Yahoo's blandly curated portal could stay relevant in the era of social media. He's the right man for the job. Google search has been doomed for a long time. It is another Yahoo.
- somenameforme 1y ago
  LLMs have, for me at least, mostly replaced search. Because one of the most common things I search for is stuff like 'what is the function in [x] that does [y] in [z]'. Search for that on Google (or any other search engine) and your results will be complete trash. Search for it on an LLM and it's one of the few things they're nearly perfect at. Search engines, especially with the resources of Google, could have developed at least basically functional natural language search decades ago. Instead they chose to rest on their laurels (pagerank even still plays a significant role!), and secure market control by anti-competitive behavior. Google is certainly well on their way to becoming another Yahoo, but there's no extrinsic reason for it in the same way there was no reason for Yahoo to become what it became. In 100 years people will be searching the corpus of human writings (or whatever medium is dominant then) for information that's relevant to them. So there's in intrinsic reason for any search related company to just naturally die. It simply needs to keep innovating, or at least evolutionarily improving.
  - starfallg 1y ago
    > Because one of the most common things I search for is stuff like 'what is the function in [x] that does [y] in [z]'. This is also the type of search that Google makes no money from. The money is in searching for up-to-date relevant product information, where Google is the undisputed leader. >Search engines, especially with the resources of Google, could have developed at least basically functional natural language search decades ago Google is one of the major AI research outfits, and arguably the only one that continues to deliver consistently over the last 2 decades. Statistical Machine Translation/Google Translate, Adwords Quality Score, TensorFlow, AlphaGo, Attention is all you need (Transformers), AlphaFold all Google innovations. You can't really blame the prevalence of SEO slop on Google. It's not the lack of want of trying, it is hard technically (see how long it took to develop modern AI capabilities), expensive computationally (as we can see with the unsustainable cost of test-time search in ChatGPT) and in terms of user-experience. >Google is certainly well on their way to becoming another Yahoo Really, it isn't. Google is in the unique position of being the closest technology company to achieving full vertical integration of their value chain, from silicon to software to data to end-users. They are also at the forefront of frontier AI, including productising the research output. I don't really get the Google hate on HN, apart from maybe the YC/sama bias.
AbstractH24 1y ago
Google over the last 10 years or so (maybe even more) is a great example of the disruptor becoming the incumbent
- aydyn 1y ago
  Google search increased 22% from 2023 to 2024. You sure about that?
  - evanelias 1y ago
    An increase in searches isn't necessarily a positive thing. Anecdotally, I've increased the number of Google searches I do simply because it now requires multiple attempts to frame my query in a way that provides the results I'm actually looking for!
    - simfree 1y ago
      A decrease in search quality has damaged trust with the userbase, making crummy, unreliable data sources like LLMs seem much more viable.
      - AbstractH24 1y ago
        Do you have any evidence to prove this? Seems logical to me, but then my 71 year old mother with doctorates in both science and literature pulls out her phone and trusts Google AI results without thinking twice.
    - Melatonic 1y ago
      But think of all the additional ads that uBlock origin is now hiding you could have seen :-D
      - evanelias 1y ago
        Believe it or not, some of us don't use ad blockers. The ads are easy to ignore anyway when they're as irrelevant as the bad search results!
bitpush 1y ago
[flagged]
- awithrow 1y ago
  They never said he was there in those years or was involved in the failed acquisitions. Had Google been acquired then, yes, eventually Raghavan would have been calling the shots.
- tomhow 1y ago
  > Are you just pulling this out of your ass? Please edit swipes out of comments on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

by btilly 1y ago

throwup238 1y ago

The HN discussion on that article has a lot of great commentary, including from some insiders: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976

findingMeaning 1y ago

[flagged]

crossroadsguy 1y ago
> In hindu mythology, Raghavan (also Ravana [1]), who was blessed by gods and turned into villain by abducting Sita from lord Ram. WTH :D Raghavan != Ravana (Only relation is that they were on the opposite sides and that made pretty much the whole epic Ramayana) Raghavan comes from "Raghu" (another name for Ram). Raghavan kinda means "from Raghu" or so like "His descendants" or so. AFAIK
amitheonlyone 1y ago
Yea this is just pure bs. If you had taken to search for the name, you'd have found the wiki explaining the name's origin. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raghavan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raghavan Also,Raghavan is most probably his father's name and Prabhakar will be his given name.
- ricardobayes 1y ago
  It's not unimaginable that a wonky google search or an AI summary led him to this.
- gopkarthik 1y ago
  It is fitting that GP's username is `findingMeaning`.

antithesizer 1y ago

What do you do when you have a product whose value will inevitably drop in the medium/long-term? Squeeze every penny out of it while you still can. There is no solution to the SEO arms race, like there was no way Yahoo's blandly curated portal could stay relevant in the era of social media. He's the right man for the job. Google search has been doomed for a long time. It is another Yahoo.

somenameforme 1y ago
LLMs have, for me at least, mostly replaced search. Because one of the most common things I search for is stuff like 'what is the function in [x] that does [y] in [z]'. Search for that on Google (or any other search engine) and your results will be complete trash. Search for it on an LLM and it's one of the few things they're nearly perfect at. Search engines, especially with the resources of Google, could have developed at least basically functional natural language search decades ago. Instead they chose to rest on their laurels (pagerank even still plays a significant role!), and secure market control by anti-competitive behavior. Google is certainly well on their way to becoming another Yahoo, but there's no extrinsic reason for it in the same way there was no reason for Yahoo to become what it became. In 100 years people will be searching the corpus of human writings (or whatever medium is dominant then) for information that's relevant to them. So there's in intrinsic reason for any search related company to just naturally die. It simply needs to keep innovating, or at least evolutionarily improving.
- starfallg 1y ago
  > Because one of the most common things I search for is stuff like 'what is the function in [x] that does [y] in [z]'. This is also the type of search that Google makes no money from. The money is in searching for up-to-date relevant product information, where Google is the undisputed leader. >Search engines, especially with the resources of Google, could have developed at least basically functional natural language search decades ago Google is one of the major AI research outfits, and arguably the only one that continues to deliver consistently over the last 2 decades. Statistical Machine Translation/Google Translate, Adwords Quality Score, TensorFlow, AlphaGo, Attention is all you need (Transformers), AlphaFold all Google innovations. You can't really blame the prevalence of SEO slop on Google. It's not the lack of want of trying, it is hard technically (see how long it took to develop modern AI capabilities), expensive computationally (as we can see with the unsustainable cost of test-time search in ChatGPT) and in terms of user-experience. >Google is certainly well on their way to becoming another Yahoo Really, it isn't. Google is in the unique position of being the closest technology company to achieving full vertical integration of their value chain, from silicon to software to data to end-users. They are also at the forefront of frontier AI, including productising the research output. I don't really get the Google hate on HN, apart from maybe the YC/sama bias.

AbstractH24 1y ago

Google over the last 10 years or so (maybe even more) is a great example of the disruptor becoming the incumbent

aydyn 1y ago
Google search increased 22% from 2023 to 2024. You sure about that?
- evanelias 1y ago
  An increase in searches isn't necessarily a positive thing. Anecdotally, I've increased the number of Google searches I do simply because it now requires multiple attempts to frame my query in a way that provides the results I'm actually looking for!
  - simfree 1y ago
    A decrease in search quality has damaged trust with the userbase, making crummy, unreliable data sources like LLMs seem much more viable.
    - AbstractH24 1y ago
      Do you have any evidence to prove this? Seems logical to me, but then my 71 year old mother with doctorates in both science and literature pulls out her phone and trusts Google AI results without thinking twice.
  - Melatonic 1y ago
    But think of all the additional ads that uBlock origin is now hiding you could have seen :-D
    - evanelias 1y ago
      Believe it or not, some of us don't use ad blockers. The ads are easy to ignore anyway when they're as irrelevant as the bad search results!

bitpush 1y ago

[flagged]

awithrow 1y ago
They never said he was there in those years or was involved in the failed acquisitions. Had Google been acquired then, yes, eventually Raghavan would have been calling the shots.
tomhow 1y ago
> Are you just pulling this out of your ass? Please edit swipes out of comments on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html