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
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 the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google properties, had called a “code yellow” for search revenue due to, and I quote, “steady weakness in the daily numbers” and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind.
Wonder how this isn’t bigger news. The story is shocking, but absolutely confirms my gut feeling that google search has gone to shit in the last few years, and was fine before
Prabhakar Raghavan and the McKinsey-inspired management class forced the real tech people out and shit all over the search engine intentionally to squeeze out more short-term profits. Google: An Enshittification Tale
Google internal politics ousted the last of the OG Google guys and replaced him with the same person who killed Yahoo, Prabhakar Raghavan.
The general consensus is that all of the changes to Google since 2019 were driven by profit instead of trying to find things, like a search engine should. And those decisions were spearheaded by Prabhakar Raghavan, who used the training of a data scientist to run Google into the ground for short term financial gain. Sundae Prichai hired Prabhakar Raghavan directly and then promoted him from Head of Ads to Head of Search after firing the guy who had been helping guide Google Search since 1999.
In this rare case, I would totally suggest you read the article. It has the perfect amount of humor mixed with shocking facts (revealed via email evidence from the Google antitrust case) and it wraps it all up in a way that's easy to understand.
A man named Raghavan has been taken on as a major operational manager for yahoo, ibm, etc. Seems his direction of their operations lines up with a sudden collapse in quality in the areas he was at. Regardless everyone seems to discuss how he is one of the best researchers in field. The dark design, and other issues, google has been seeing an increase in, for years, is basically his direction and, while he isn't the CEO, he basically runs google.
As an programmer, I want to think out loud about possible technical solutions.
I would have kept the understandable / hand-made algorithm as the core of search results. If you want to do fancy machine learning, do it on the periphery and we can include the machine output in our algorithm and weight its importance by hand. This would allow us to back out of the decision, because we could lower the weight of the machine learning output as needed.
It sounds like Google jumped strait to including the machine learning in the core algorithm though, and now with a decade of complexity in the core algorithm they are no longer able to go back without huge effort.
In general, it's important to consider "is this a decision we can easily back out of?".
Exactly, and that's something my company is aggressively moving toward, even though our userbase is nothing like Google's. It's just good engineering to be able to rapidly undo an unfavorable rollout.
It overall seems like a good article but this is why I kind of hate Ed Zirtron's reporting:
For those unfamiliar with Google’s internal scientology-esque jargon, let me explain. A “code yellow” isn’t, as you might think, a crisis of moderate severity. The yellow, according to Steven Levy’s tell-all book about Google, refers to — and I promise that I’m not making this up — the color of a tank top that former VP of Engineering Wayne Rosing used to wear during his time at the company. It’s essentially the equivalent of DEFCON 1 and activates, as Levy explained, a war room-like situation
Overall the reporting is interesting, but weird comments like this show his naked disdain for everyone and everything in the tech industry which does not make him a particularly trustworthy source.
Like "oh my god, how dare a company choose an arbitrary alert system based on a quirky influential engineer's practices, what crazy psychos!"
If he sees the code yellow tank top thing as some crazy ridiculous thing that no company should do, then I can't really trust his interpretation of the rest of the emails and documents etc.
Later in the article, he boils everything down to literally "Heroes vs Villains", and maybe in this case both of them are archetypal representations of those roles, but based on his appearances on behind the bastards it feels more like he always needs to boil everything down to black and white, good vs evil, bastard vs non bastard, with nothing in between, which again, makes it hard to trust his overall interpretations of what he's read.
It seems clear to me that he hates the people that are ruining the tech industry, ripping off customers, and pumping out shitty projects for short term stuck pumps, and he takes every opportunity to shit on those people and point out their idiosyncrasies. That's pretty much every tech CEO these days.
It's also pretty clear to me that he believes in the promise of the industry, and thinks that workers deserve better than the people that they work for.
Hunter S Thompson wrote a scathing eulogy for Richard Nixon, which I think is relevant here:
"Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism -- which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful."
Sometimes, you need one or two journalists who are in a position to say "you know what? These people suck, and I'm sick of pretending they don't". It doesn't need to be every journalist, and it probably shouldn't be, but someone needs to say it.
Yeah, I mean that's kinda of the whole conceit of Behind the Bastards, the host is explicitly and inherently calling everyone they cover a bastard by default, but if you listen to Ed Zirtron's appearances, he always just immediately wants to boil them down to a bastard as the root cause of their actions, when the literal entire point of that show is to examine what factors and backgrounds turn someone into a bastard.
Or again, I just can't understand why he would be flabbergasted by a company naming their alert system after an early engineers' tank top colour. Does he think all quirkiness and whisky should be outlawed from the workplace?
Yes, there's value in calling people bastards and scum and villains, but Ed Zirtron does it immediately, every time, which makes his judgement of them untrustworthy. There's the old adage that "if everything hurts when you poke it your finger is broken", in Ed's case given that everyone is always a bastard or a hero, it seems more plausible to me that he has some pathological need to boil everything down to simple binary systems.
It’s an interesting piece and starts in the traditional journalism mold, but moves much more into opinion and blog. Like going from NewsHour to Last Week Tonight. That’s not to say it’s not an interesting read or he’s not supporting his argument, but it is about persuading, not just reporting. Of course, I haven’t actually gone through all his references to see if they’re mischaracterized or taken out of context.
I agree with both your comments, but there's something so satisfying about reading vitriol about a type of person you fucking hate. I kinda liked that he doesn't hide his bias or disdain for these people.
Overall the reporting is interesting, but weird comments like this show his naked disdain for everyone and everything in the tech industry which does not make him a particularly trustworthy source.
I'd disagree - what this shows is only disdain for everyone who's fucking up technologies for the sake of profit. And I'm with him there, I found it refreshing to read an accurate account of what pieces of shit work behind the scenes in the industry. Not that I am surprised, but the account of what seems to have happened in detail and in that sequence was new to me.
I'd disagree - what this shows is only disdain for everyone who's fucking up technologies for the sake of profit.
Well you can disagree all you want but I don't see how you can read his snarky comments and think that.
His criticism of the code yellow is not because anyone involved in the code yellow procedure, invention, or naming deserves anything. He just hates everyone in tech so much that a whimsical name must be a bastard move, and not just people at their job trying to make the most of it.
I found it refreshing to read an accurate account of what pieces of shit work behind the scenes in the industry
Yeah, cause you're accepting his characterizations of everyone as bastards at face value despite not knowing them and despite knowing that Ed Zirtron thinks everyone is a bastard because it makes his world simpler. Yes it is "refreshing" to stop thinking about complex chains of actions and consequences and just think "he's an evil bastard man and it's all his fault".
It’s like a reverse Kara Swisher. Which, though I hate her work and her complete lack of integrity, I don’t want. I totally get and agree with your take.
It's somewhat clear that search engines are too prone to go to shit, either due to malice or something worse (like stupidity).
Based on that, I wonder if a user-run, free-as-speech and open source decentralised search system wouldn't work. Roughly in the spirit of torrents - where anyone can use the system but if you're using it you're expected to contribute with it too.
You just described the categories pages many search engines had before Google. Or proto Web 2.0 bookmark sharing sites like del.icio.us. Sites like Metafilter also existed as a kind of Internet index before everyone was adding reddit.com to their Googling. It's a laudable idea, but these systems all seem to fall prey to market manipulation in much the same way that SEO helped kill Google.
I was thinking on something slightly different. It would be automatic; a bit more like "federated Google" and less like old style indexing sites. It's something like this:
there are central servers with info about pages on the internet
you perform searches through a program or add-on (let's call it "the software")
as you're using the software, performing your search, it'll also crawl the web and assign a "desirability" value to the pages, with that info being added to the server that you're using
the algorithm is open and, if you so desire, you can create your own server and fork the algorithm
It would be vulnerable to SEO, but less so than Google - because SEO tailored to the algorithm being used by one server won't necessarily work well for another server.
Please, however, note that this is "ideas guy" tier. I wouldn't be surprised if it's unviable, for some reason that I don't know.
There was (is?) the yacy project which used a distributed index, and the individual nodes would contribute to the index.
A hybrid of original Yahoo! and Google is probably the best option. Sites submit themselves, they get reviewed, and an algorithm catalogs the contents. So curation and automatic indexing together.
I've been using foss.family for a little while with good results.
You have to spend a bit of time selecting and using different instances before you find one that suits you. I tried about three before this one and I don't think I'll need to change again.
One part of this (which isn't really covered in the article) is that Google historically had a give-and-take relationship with people gaming search engine results. SEO has been a thing for a long time, and it's impossible to make it go away. However, Google used to punish sites that took it too far. It wasn't necessarily ideal, but it worked well enough to keep egregious spam out of the top level results, and companies could still direct users to their site when they had something they were actually looking for. SEO consulting companies sprang up who knew Google's rules well, and that arguably meant a bunch of grifters being overpaid, but at least the results stayed relevant.
Google seems to have given up on enforcing many of those rules.
The problem that I see with self-hosting is that it isn't a practical reality for most people, due to different tech expertises and machine capabilities. Instead I think that a better system would allow you to simply install some software, and contribute as much as you can while you use it.
I'm not informed on MetaFilter. From your other comment it seems that it's also an indexing site (besides being a community - from their "About" page). Is this correct?
The amount sadness for the loss of Google Search accuracy due to ad infiltration the author writes here shows how much of a corporate brand dick rider a lot of people are.
These corporations do not give a fuck about you, so mourning their loss is so pathetic.
No one cares Google sucks now. If you do, go get a fucking life. Move on and use something else for fucks sake. They won't care if you're dead, why do you cry when these corporations die?
I'm not sad that Google turned out to be evil because I care about Google. I don't care about Google. I'm disappointed in no longer being able to search for and find the things online on any search engine.
I've been enjoying Kagi, although it also proxies google and others, and you have to pay for it, and I was dismayed to read on Lemmy recently that the CEO may be a sea lion. So yeah, the search for good search continues I suppose
It used to help me greatly at my job (software development). I'm using mostly DDG as a replacement but it just isn't even close to what Google used to be years ago.
No one cares Google sucks now. If you do, go get a fucking life.
Dude, no. Having good search results matter. People are directly influenced by what comes out at the top of search results. Finding a good reference makes the difference between a well sourced claim and just talking out of your ass. It absolutely has an effect on public discourse at large.
It doesn't have to be Google, but Google was so good at it for so long that we're now kinda lost.
Google was so good at it for so long that we're now kinda lost.
Then either adapt or die. Move on to another search engine, host your own, use an AI LLM or go to the fucking library.
Complaining to a corporation doesn't do shit unless you affect their bottom line. And so far all these articles and message boards with losers complaining about this have done nothing to slow it down or reverse Google's trajectory.