TechTakes @awful.systems David Gerard @awful.systems 7mo ago

Ed Zitron documents Prabhakar Raghavan, the actual guy who turned Google Search into complete shit

www.wheresyoured.at The Man Who Killed Google Search

This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it. The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then

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Do you want to know what Prabhakar Raghavan’s old job was? What Prabhakar Raghavan, the new head of Google Search, the guy that has run Google Search into the ground, the guy who is currently destroying search, did before his job at Google?

He was the head of search for Yahoo from 2005 through 2012 [...]

Christ on a stick, the fucking lore I'm learning today. I had never heard the name Prabhakar Raghavan before, but it seems like this dude has been the man behind the curtain in my life for a while. I used to use Yahoo before Google in the early 2000s before it became shit, and then I used Google until it became shit. I hope he doesn't end up applying at DuckDuckGo next season.
- Prabhakar’s mask falls off and it’s Vlad from Kagi
  
  and then he trips and falls over and we find out Vlad’s just 3 small Peters Thiel in an overcoat
  
  Peters Thiel or Peter Thiels?
  
  @Akasazh @self it's definitely Peters Thiel now
  
  Ok Julian. I definately prefer you over Mr. stick btw
  
  It would be nice if Julian made carrot cake. They just make apple pie.
- It's crazy, he co-authored the randomized algorithms textbook for a class I had in grad school. That and the information retrieval book he wrote are probably the two biggest components of his engineer cosplay, even to this day.
- I've been wondering whether "a functional web search" is something that will increasingly become impossible as the death of the web progresses.

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