[HN Gopher] The man who killed Google Search?
___________________________________________________________________
The man who killed Google Search?
Author : elorant
Score : 829 points
Date : 2024-04-23 16:43 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wheresyoured.at)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wheresyoured.at)
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > a computer scientist class traitor that sided with the
| management consultancy sect
|
| Well if that ain't the purdiest turn of phrase
| bsimpson wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| How can one learn to do this?
| gnarbarian wrote:
| you need to put more stat points into speech.
| dekhn wrote:
| not from a jedi
| dageshi wrote:
| 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.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Get born into a wealthier family
| seanhunter wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| No worries at all, happens to the best of us!
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > It's a little confusing because some of them are part of
| one big, fat thread that you have to read from the bottom up
|
| It seems no-one, not even Google, can escape Outlook-style
| email concatenation.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| The article has a bunch of links like this one:
| https://www.justice.gov/usdoj-media/atr/media/1322631/dl
|
| If you follow them you'll get copies of email threads related
| to a suit against Google where the non-public information was
| revealed.
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| It's based on emails published as evidence in a trial:
|
| * https://www.justice.gov/usdoj-
| media/atr/media/1322631/dl?inl...
|
| * https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-11/417557.pdf
|
| * https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-11/417581.pdf
| skilled wrote:
| Google is doing something similar now[0], both from a _searchers_
| and a _site owners_ perspective.
|
| Barry Schwartz regularly posts Google updates on his site[1], for
| over a decade no less. Since August 2023, those updates have been
| reaching the 500 mean comment range with many updates reaching
| 700-900 comment range. And this has been happening for 8 straight
| months!
|
| People have been robbed of their livelihoods and many have caught
| strays, with the culprit being that Reddit, Quora, and LinkedIn
| have tripled/doubled their traffic.
|
| I just don't understand why Google can't create a Discussions
| panel and let people decide what they want to view as opposed to
| flat out cutting creators off at the knees.
|
| No content creator thinks to themselves, "let me go write my next
| article on Reddit".
|
| Now they are throwing AI in the mix also which is probably the
| dumbest thing they could have done, but I get why they are doing
| it.
|
| I hope it clicks for Google soon that they are "fucked" and will
| never recover users they lost to OpenAI, etc.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40067605
|
| [1]: https://www.seroundtable.com/category/google-updates
| tgv wrote:
| > People have been robbed of their livelihoods
|
| That's absurd. People gambled with their livelihood, some got
| rich, and most lost.
| arromatic wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_.
| blueflow wrote:
| If you never had the right to have people find your
| website, you are not getting robbed. You can only get
| robbed of things you have some right to.
| skilled wrote:
| Not sure what you are getting at. Care to elaborate?
|
| Google wouldn't exist without websites to index.
| blueflow wrote:
| Its not robbery if you never had the rights to it? You
| misused that word.
| skilled wrote:
| What would be a better word, given the context?
| blueflow wrote:
| maybe "loss of income for content creators"?
| tgv wrote:
| In that logic, someone removing their websites robs
| Google of content.
| zrn900 wrote:
| Those people did everything according to Google's guidelines
| then Google changed everything and screwed them over. That's
| what has been happening all the way since 2010 when they
| issued their first update and penalized all the small sites
| for following their guidelines. They are screwing everyone
| for their shareholders' sake.
|
| > gambled with their livelihood
|
| Google owns ~90% of search. Its basically a public utility at
| this point. On which every small business owner has to rely.
| There is no saying "Go use a competitor" when using a
| competitor means you will lose access to ~90% of world search
| traffic. Imagine your salary being cut down to 10% of what it
| was last month - that's what using an 'alternative' to google
| for your business means.
|
| These tech giants have been holding literal unregulated power
| over the livelihoods of people for decades now. And as we
| have recently come to see in many examples, they use that
| power to screw over everyone for shareholders.
|
| The situation we have today is a situation that is as crazy
| as privatizing the entire road network and allowing an
| unregulated company to do whatever with the traffic that runs
| on it.
| arromatic wrote:
| I feel like google is prioritizing reddit way more than regular
| forums . Quora is the second most annoying thing , Search for y
| , Click on top result which is Quora > Either it's a personal
| opinion or a brand account answering or the real answer is
| locked behind subscription . Not to mention the dominance of
| large brands like this https://detailed.com/google-control/ and
| non existent personal sites . But i am still pessimistic about
| new search engines like bing has backing of a behemoth
| microsoft yet can't copy simple features from google.
| skilled wrote:
| Quora and LinkedIn are also heavily overrun with AI garbage.
| Quora does it flat out, and LinkedIn launched Pulse to farm
| millions of AI generated topics and then invite its users to
| contribute.
|
| LinkedIn is now one of the top results for topics like
| metaphysics, quantum physics, etc.
|
| It's a clown show.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| I've also noticed that I'm getting top results from
| companies who definitely have big AdSense spend, theres
| likely a bias or ads aren't labeled at all. However, with
| some companies I sometimes find that the page being listed
| often doesn't even exist anymore or is simply just a title
| of an article who's keywords match popular searches but
| there is actually no content or blog post, just a
| title..This SEO strategy somehow can get you top ranked on
| Google these days. Yeah RIP Google.
| TheCleric wrote:
| I feel like at least on Reddit results you'll get something
| that may be helpful. The Quora results have NEVER resulted in
| something useful for me.
| trhway wrote:
| >I hope it clicks for Google soon that they are "fucked" and
| will never recover users they lost to OpenAI, etc.
|
| It happens to pretty much all companies. A paradigm shift
| pulling the rag from underneath the big company, and the big
| company just can't turn itself to ride the new paradigm. Like
| say Sun Micosrosystems not able to switch from their super-
| expensive Big Iron to horizontally [super-]scaled cheap x86.
| And usually it doesn't "click" - the management just rides the
| gravy train until it lasts.
|
| I've been for years wondering what will displace Google - I was
| sure that such paradigm shift would happen as always, I just
| couldn't say what it will be (my imagination was just failing
| at how one can displace a trillion dollar gorilla), and now we
| get to observe that process - the tech like snake dropping old
| skin and emerging in a beatifull new one - in all its glory
| again.
| drubio wrote:
| Wow, it had been years since I read a Barry Schwartz post, a
| SEO authority since back in the day, I didn't realize his forum
| had turned so nasty.
|
| Funny you mention 'No content creator thinks to themselves,
| "let me go write my next article on Reddit"'. Schwartz and many
| other SERP/SEO experts talked about writing for medium, circa
| ~2013, to raise their Google rankings, back when everyone
| jumped on the medium bandwagon.
|
| Google is bleeding ends users and content creators alike. If
| search results are getting worse for end users, many AI price
| points (free or $20/month) or ad-free paid search (Kagi) are
| eating away at Google's market share. At the other end, content
| producers which had a symbiotic revenue sharing relationship
| are also jumping ship.
|
| As you point out, Google will likely never recover, they
| dropped the ball at both ends: worse end user experience and
| worse ad revenue sharing, both of which were their lifeblood. I
| think Google in a few years will be like Yahoo search or AOL
| email before it, they will still have users, but most likely
| not by free will, but rather users landed through OEM/marketing
| deals.
| vgeek wrote:
| I also follow SERoundtable (I have worked as SEO/digital
| marketer/developer for roughly 20 years), but tend to discount
| many of the comments due to the assumption that many of the
| people complaining in broken English may not actually have the
| quality of site that they believe they do, but there are _tons_
| of good sites getting caught up in updates-- not just now, but
| in every update. The past ~2-3 years have had entire _types_ of
| sites (e.g., useful blogs, data driven sites, useful /non-
| spammy aggregator sites) get wholesale
| demoted/deranked/deindexed.
|
| In ~2016 Google started shifting towards optimizing for
| financial objectives more aggressively than user experience.
| Timing updates to coincide with beginning/end of fiscal
| quarters, blending ads, features solely created to drive
| incremental searches (People Also Ask/Related Searches),
| various misaligned defaults within GAds interface, branded
| search extortion, stance against header bidding, etc..
| Essentially when they stopped promoting the "Don't be evil."
| slogan, they had legitimate reason to do so.
|
| If I could give anyone advice with regards to establishing a
| website that is reliant on Google for traffic-- it would be to
| be extremely careful. I have one site now that is super high
| utility for end users, great UX, super fast, high repeat user
| rate, no ads/tracking/popup spam, great feedback from users and
| it is -60% in Google traffic from the March 2024 core update.
| There is 0 support from anyone at Google to identify why a site
| suddenly loses traffic. There are search liaisons who give
| snarky replies, but good luck getting any constructive
| feedback.
|
| Even relying on paid traffic is just as dangerous-- given the
| black box that is Quality Score (it ties mostly to Click
| Through Rate, but has adjustable floor to increase effective
| costs) and Google's consistent drive away from _measurable_
| performance that helped them destroy traditional marketing
| channels so successfully.
|
| All that I can think is that there is absolute panic at Google
| right now. When >50% of product searches start directly on
| Amazon (https://searchengineland.com/50-of-product-searches-
| start-on...), Google can't siphon anything off. With Meta
| adding things like Llama 3 to FB Messenger, there is going to
| be another _huge_ hit to Google query volume-- albeit most
| likely low commercial intent queries (see: not as monetizable
| by Google), at least initially, but it will help increase user
| familiarity with chatbots and observed data will probably help
| improve Meta ad targeting ability in ways that may rival search
| query intent.
|
| High value categories like home services, banking and finance
| are among Google's last relatively safe bastions of profit--
| but eventually advertisers in these spaces have to reach a
| level of sophistication to realize they're giving too much of
| their margin to Google, leading to push-back. Highly
| fragmented, lower margin spaces like restaurants (or other
| "near me" driven niches) that have success on GMaps seem
| relatively safe for Google at this point. If Meta handles the
| chatbot transition (if it actually happens) well, they stand to
| gain a lot of ground there, too, given that they do already
| have a decent amount of small businesses who use FB pages as
| their sole internet presence, along with associated meta-data
| like hours/location/menus/reviews.
| arromatic wrote:
| So everyone should start making html only site like danluu or
| pre -2000 ?
| slotrans wrote:
| that would be fantastic tbqh
|
| the web could be fast!
| stefan_ wrote:
| Ok, but the likelihood is 99.9% that I would rather read posts
| on Reddit than any LLM autogenerated ad laden malware garbage
| from SEO spammers.
| refulgentis wrote:
| 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.
| zaphar wrote:
| As a Xoogler from 2007-2013 it saddens me to hear how it's
| changed since I was there. At the time it was definitely one of
| the best places to work in tech for me at least.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Sometimes I joke it was me - ex. my first year was the first
| year with no holiday gift. I'm really grateful I got there
| when I did, it was just enough to give me a year or two of
| enough of old Google that I can look back on it fondly.
|
| I did peer counselling for a year or two, before leaving, and
| still follow along on Blind, and it was utterly depressing to
| hear from someone who joined the last couple years/post-
| COVID. 100% just another job now, besides the comp., and
| given the 1.5 years of constant firings and attendant self-
| interested behavior, you're forced to recognize this very
| quickly.
| throwaway35777 wrote:
| Are there any places like it nowadays?
| spitfire wrote:
| > relative to those old dunderheads babbling their opinions
| about users.
|
| Why did I read this in Connie Sacks' voice talking to George
| Smiley (The Alec Guinness one)?
|
| I'm sure they'll get Karla (Raghavan), in the end. It's his
| fanaticism that will do him in.
| shombaboor wrote:
| Thinking about search ads over time, I had forgotten how ads were
| clearly marked in a blue box way back when.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Now I just don't see them at all!
| lo_fye wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Friend! Get thee to https://ublockorigin.com/ ! You can thank
| me later!
| delduca wrote:
| Get it until the Manifesto V3.
| kelnos wrote:
| 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.)
| secondcoming wrote:
| People use it because web devs force them to use it
| szszrk wrote:
| This does not fix poor content thrown in disguise of search
| results.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Speaking of AI ruining Google search,
|
| https://bsky.app/profile/dahosek.bsky.social/post/3kqm25jwsf...
| arromatic wrote:
| That's crazy.
| fireflash38 wrote:
| 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.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > At certain company sizes, the direct output of entire
| divisions ceases to be visible to leadership. > What they
| receive instead are reports that filter up through
| management.
|
| Yeah but it doesn't have to be this way. I put in these
| details that are summarized in 1 or 2 easy to read bullet
| points, but asked to remove them because 'leaders are
| thinking about things on a strategic level'.
|
| And don't get me started on promotion. If I find/do something
| that improves the teams performance by 10x, "that is just
| doing my job, please don't bring up stuff like that to
| management." "you need to have impact across teams". So every
| team is trying to make every other team take on their
| 'product' and no one wants to take on other teams product
| because even if it improves their quality / productivity,
| they don't get anything for it.
| RankingMember wrote:
| All the adulation and covers devoted to Sam Bankman-Fried come
| to mind.
| kurthr wrote:
| Who is going to pay you more for the puff piece journamalism
| than a multi-billionaire conman?
|
| https://prospect.org/article/press-release-journamalism/
| bboygravity wrote:
| They're not fluff pieces. They're ads. Bought and paid for.
| hughesjj wrote:
| Potato potato
| ryandrake wrote:
| > People failing with golden parachutes, and others failing
| upwards into even more lucrative roles. I think that's the
| thing that is eating away at the core of our society
|
| And it's not just "people" in general. It's certain people:
| It's people beyond a certain tipping point in their careers.
|
| If I, as a low level worker bee fail in my job, to the point
| where I need to leave, I just leave and jump back into Resume
| Thunderdome to fight for the privilege of doing another 11
| round interview nightmare full of code challenges and take home
| tests.
|
| If my first level manager fails and leaves, he might have a bit
| of a tough time too, maybe a little easier since he has that
| all-important "manager experience" that unlocks many doors in
| silicon valley that are shut to me.
|
| On the opposite side, if anyone in my company who is SVP and up
| fails spectacularly, they are 100% leaving with an exit bonus
| of $millions and are probably getting a title bump in their
| next job: a job that is literally sitting there waiting for
| them to take, no job application needed.
|
| I visualize it as a hill. At my level, when you leave the
| company and let go of the rock, it rolls down and to the left,
| back into Thunderdome. Past a certain crest in the hill, which
| we'll call "Director," the rock rolls down and to the right
| when you fail, and you get better and better positions.
|
| People easily see this exclusive club and yea it's demotivating
| as hell, and eats away at the idea that the world is just,
| fair, egalitarian. It's certainly corrosive to society.
| dvt wrote:
| > People failing with golden parachutes, and others failing
| upwards into even more lucrative roles.
|
| I read stuff like this all the time, but this take is actually
| extremely reductive. (Otherwise, every moron out there would be
| making 7 figures, but they don't.) It's not as if these folks
| are utterly incompetent in their roles, but in fact they
| optimize for things you think don't matter (but actually do.)
| For example, if you can get a promotion just by knowing people,
| why would you optimize for building a better product, when you
| could optimize for getting a box and inviting C-execs at a
| football game?
|
| To wit, sitting on a board is often "free money" and those
| positions are purely obtained by networking. Life is much more
| of a popularity contest than people ( _especially_ engineers)
| want to believe and EQ pays off much more than IQ does. We are,
| at the end of the day, social creatures.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| > I read stuff like this all the time, but this take is
| actually extremely reductive. (Otherwise, every moron out
| there would be making 7 figures, but they don't.)
|
| Your parenthesized logic is fallacious. No one is saying
| there's _no_ filter of who gets to make 7 figures. What
| people are saying is that _merit isn 't the filter_.
|
| > It's not as if these folks are utterly incompetent in their
| roles, but in fact they optimize for things you think don't
| matter (but actually do.) For example, if you can get a
| promotion just by knowing people, why would you optimize for
| building a better product, when you could optimize for
| getting a box and inviting C-execs at a football game?
|
| > To wit, sitting on a board is often "free money" and those
| positions are purely obtained by networking. Life is much
| more of a popularity contest than people (especially
| engineers) want to believe and EQ pays off much more than IQ
| does. We are, at the end of the day, social creatures.
|
| You seem to be presenting nepotism as if it's a feature when
| it's obviously a bug.
|
| I mean, do you not see how building worse products because
| you can get away with knowing people is worse for society?
|
| If you cause your company to fail but you keep getting
| promoted because you are good at managing upward, you _are_
| incompetent in your role.
|
| _Your role is supposed to be making your company successful.
| Your role IS NOT supposed to be networking yourself into free
| money._
| dvt wrote:
| > You seem to be presenting nepotism as if it's a feature
| when it's obviously a bug.
|
| I guess that's where we disagree: in my view, it's
| definitely a feature. When I have kids, I will 100% be
| willing to give them opportunities over other (more
| qualified) people. It's not even really a question in my
| mind. I am much more likely to invest in a friend's company
| ("friends and family" rounds are a thing, you know); I am
| much more likely to get into business with close
| associates, and so on.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| ...which is why society needs safeguards to guard against
| people like you.
|
| Applied systemically, your behavior is one of the most
| harmful forces in our society.
|
| And by the way, at a personal level, I get it. You like
| your friends and family--everyone does. But if we're
| going to have any pretense that capitalism works, we need
| to have a system where good work is rewarded. What you're
| arguing for isn't a free market, it's an oligarchy.
|
| I'll note that there's a significant shifting of the
| goalposts between your previous post and this one, too.
| Before, you were saying that networking is a valuable
| skill, and that's somewhat true, but now you're admitting
| that competence never had anything to do with it. If
| someone happens to be your child, you're happy to give
| them positions they don't deserve even if they're
| completely incompetent.
| dvt wrote:
| > If someone happens to be your child, you're happy to
| give them positions they don't deserve even if they're
| completely incompetent.
|
| Yeah, I'm being a bit contrarian & spicy for the sake of
| argument (don't hold it against me, my actual position is
| way more nuanced), but even so: I don't really see how
| nepotism forges a path to oligarchy. If they _are_
| completely incompetent, they 'll run the company into the
| ground and the free market still wins.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| I'd rather have an honest discussion than a "contrarian
| and spicy" one. Care to present your more nuanced actual
| opinion?
| thenberlin wrote:
| I don't think you refuted the underlying point so much as
| gave cause to it. The idea isn't that simply stupid people
| rise to the top, it's that people who are capable of gaming a
| system without providing for or attending to the system
| they're deftly traversing are floated by their
| EQ/credentials/jargon straight over the corpses of the things
| they were actually meant to shepherd or build. I have seen
| this over and over again, and frankly managed to sometimes
| straddle the line enough to play along and be the beneficiary
| of this sort of corporate backchannel -- it's a very real,
| very human thing.
|
| I've watched wildly incapable people bluff their way up a
| corporate ladder, fail over the course of two years in an
| elevated role, and then use that previous title to bluff
| their way into better positions elsewhere (and then leave
| those positions before they're totally found out to move on
| to somewhere else with a yet better title). I've watched
| people come out of McKinsey into the startup world, talk a
| major game -- they are the best conjurors of business fantasy
| at strat plannings and my god, those decks -- but then
| utterly fail to deliver for years only to end up with SVP
| roles at major companies on the "strength" of their
| backgrounds.
|
| I get it: play the man, not the puck or whatever...but
| eventually somebody has to make sure the puck ends up in the
| fucking net and not sold off to buttress quarterly earnings.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Reminds me of the Bruce Willis/Kim Basinger movie _Blind
| Date_.
|
| In that movie, Willis plays a hard worker that is unpolished,
| while his slick, suited co-worker just sails on through life.
| gopher_space wrote:
| > To wit, sitting on a board is often "free money" and those
| positions are purely obtained by networking.
|
| The people I know who've successfully demonstrated their
| ability to operate at the C level are addicted to the role
| and have more money than time. I wonder if we can come up
| with some kind of prestige leveling system and just not pay
| them after a while.
|
| A physical $100 million CEO coin with embedded connection to
| a purpose-built government blockchain. The coins are non-
| transferable.
| arromatic wrote:
| Question : Why larry and brin not caring about it ? They built
| one of world's best and biggest company and it's dying . Even if
| they did not care about that , their money is still tied to
| google stock right ? That should raise some concern from them.
| riku_iki wrote:
| they have much more money than they really need for everyday
| happiness.
| arromatic wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Do you have a link ?
| riku_iki wrote:
| https://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-was-diagnosed-
| wit...
| taco_emoji wrote:
| why are you assuming they care to do any of those things?
| sidcool wrote:
| They have achieved Nirvana. And they have enough dough to last
| several lifetimes.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Concern why?
|
| https://es.finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG/?guccounter=1&guce_r...
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| speculation: they care, they know the people involved, and
| think highly of them.
|
| Larry & Sergey are only humans. They can get bamboozled by
| people just like anyone. And they are in a situation where the
| very best bamboozlers are trying to bamboozle them, all the
| time. The people "failing up" are, in some cases, the Lebron
| James's of bamboozlement.
|
| It's quite strange to see very capable people fall for such
| types, but it happens, I've seen it - and everyone around saw
| it except the very capable person.
| arromatic wrote:
| I assume they use google search at least once after fall in
| quality and noticed it . Or maybe they got google search
| founder edition for Them. Edit : Does any one have
| email/twitter of larry/brin ? If you have can you try
| emailing them . Or is it public ? Gonna try emailing them
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Pichai must be Grima Wormtongue tier bamboozler
| slotrans wrote:
| trained by the best at McKinsey
| dekhn wrote:
| No Vic Gundotra was Grima to Larry's Theoden.
|
| There was a TGIF where prominent Search leaders (highest
| level of engineer, not management) openly asked Larry why
| we were being asked to compromise the quality of Google
| search to grow Google+ when GOogle+ was such a crappy and
| unpopular product. Larry just sort of lamely asked "can't
| you all get along" and then shortly afterwards, abdicated
| to Pichai (whose main skill was mainly to get all the SVPs
| to stop shivving each other in the quest to grow revenue).
| It was pretty clear that Vic had somehow convinced Larry
| through grima-style wormtonguing that social feed was the
| future for google, and Larry had fallen for it.
|
| The difference being, there was no gandalf to come along
| and reinvigorate Larry.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| I don't think it was Vic who convinced Larry or Sergey of
| that. It was Mark Zuckerberg. Google was in a frenzy
| about the sudden explosion of social for a few years
| before Google+ came along. Facebook's growth and rampant
| poaching of Google employees had left upper management
| despondent and fearful. It _appeared_ (though in
| hindsight we know this was wrong) that social graph
| integration was so powerful that adding social to any app
| would automatically make it win. A commonly cited example
| was that Google had bought Picasa and worked on it for
| years only to see it be smoked by Facebook Photos, a
| product with way fewer features. Then Facebook Messages
| started taking away all the personal email communication
| from Gmail, and they got into ads and so on.
|
| So you can see why Eric, Larry and Sergey were afraid.
| They were worried that Facebook might ultimately do a
| search engine that somehow integrated social
| recommendations, and that'd be the end of Google. That
| fear was shared by other top execs like Hoelzle and Alan
| Eustace iirc. No wormtonguing was required. They
| convinced themselves of that thesis all by themselves.
|
| In that environment lots of teams were trying to sprinkle
| social magic onto their product, often in hamfisted ways.
| The GMail team launched an ill-fated social network
| called Buzz that immediately upset lots of users who
| clicked through the consent popup without reading it and
| discovered that their address books were suddenly public.
| Maps was adding their own social features. Orkut was an
| actual social network popular in Brazil. But, none of
| these products integrated with each other in any way.
| They mostly even had their own separate user profiles!
| Like, there wasn't even one place to set a profile
| picture for your Google account. It was pretty
| disastrous.
|
| Given that, some attempt at a unifying social layer was
| inevitable. Gundotra gets unfairly demonized in my view.
| Google+ was probably the best that Google could have done
| to compete with Facebook. It wasn't enough because it was
| a me-too product driven by corporate fear, and such
| products are rarely compelling. But it also wasn't
| terrible. Some users really liked it.
| potatolicious wrote:
| Purely speculation of course, but based on what they've been up
| to since letting go of the reigns of Google: because squeezing
| every possible drop of revenue out of the product helps fund
| the things they're now more interested in engaging in (self-
| driving, longevity, etc.)
|
| The cynical assumption would be that they're just sitting on
| the extremely vast hoards of money and greedy for more. The
| (slightly) less cynical assumption is that their interest in
| Search nowadays is as a piggy bank for projects they consider
| more important.
|
| Worth noting though the latter has long been the going
| assumption internally at Google: Search was the cash cow that
| funded Google's expeditions in finding the Next Big Thing. This
| plan has been complicated by the appearance that Google seems
| to not be terribly good at the kind of product execution that
| would lead them to the Next Big Thing.
| morphentropic wrote:
| Man they used to drop some awesome stuff: Google Maps, GMail
| (remember the hype over Gmail invites?), Google Earth... then
| they just stopped improving stuff and started releasing
| multiple versions of things and abandoned them all, over and
| over again. Very strange.
| arromatic wrote:
| They could at least open source all the stuff on google
| graveyard which will give us so many awesome softwares .
| Sadly they are now now sitting on some random hard drives.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Not really. The relevant parts of those programs are
| basically buildable based on a list of their features.
|
| The technology that one would get in an open source
| situation isn't very usable outside of Google's ecosystem
| because Google builds software on top of Google's stack.
| Like, without the monitoring infrastructure they've built
| or the Borg scaling infrastructure, their software is
| actually kind of fragile because the ethos is " If it
| starts to malfunction break it quickly so it can cause a
| monitoring event and to get replaced by auto restart."
|
| The Google way of doing things is actually not a great
| way to architect most software that isn't running on a
| giant data center structure.
| hnfong wrote:
| Google Wave was open sourced as Apache Wave, I think. Not
| sure whether anyone actually utilized it...
| bitcharmer wrote:
| Not that strange if you think about the nature of
| transformation Google went through. With time they grew,
| hired more administrative staff and executives with fetish
| for growth and shareholder value which caused a fundamental
| shift in incentives and they reduced themselves from an
| innovative tech shop to an ad selling business. Sad but
| common and as old as Jack Welch style capitalism where
| engineering excellence gives way to corporate greed.
| debatem1 wrote:
| I was there around this time and remember the first time
| someone said out loud that they were doing project Z
| because "that's what will get me promoted". I argued until
| I was blue in the face that it was a bad idea, but they
| didn't care: they had their objective and knew how to get
| it. Unhappily, everyone was right: he got promoted and the
| project was an expensive failure.
|
| My two cents is that Google has been consumed by its
| performance review process; the amount of money made by
| advancing dwarfed the amount of money made by making
| advancements, and as always the metric was the outcome.
| arromatic wrote:
| Do you have a link to anything about performance review
| process . I am curious how msft or nintendo which known
| for innovation handles it .
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| The dominant culture in the company began to mimic the
| history of Raghavan: failing upwards, short-term gains
| with long-term detriment. When you get back far enough
| you begin to see a recurring pattern of it with these
| MBA/exec types who basically only have a bean-counter,
| extractive, understanding of running a business or making
| things.
| potatolicious wrote:
| I agree with you somewhat, having spent ~4 years at
| Google... though I think "perf-driven development" is IMO
| a symptom and exacerbating factor, but not a root cause.
|
| Advancement and fulfilling of personal ambitions is a
| common thing in basically every sufficiently large
| company. Google isn't unique in having that problem - nor
| is their promotion process markedly different than
| everyone else's!
|
| What is different is that Google is extremely metrics and
| OKR driven, combined with a near-total absence of product
| leadership. There is often _no_ broader product strategy
| besides "grow X by Y".
|
| This results in a critical weakness where you can get
| promoted for shipping Obviously Dumb Shit, because it
| hits some ill-defined OKR. It's practically an annual
| tradition within Google's management: creatively
| interpret pointless and vague OKRs so that you can make a
| (contorted) argument that Projects X and Y contribute to
| it, so you can ship it and get everyone involved their
| promos.
|
| People in other companies are ambitious and want to get
| promoted too! The difference is that in many other
| companies there are other sanity checks in place that you
| don't get promo'ed for shipping Obviously Dumb Shit.
|
| Google's root problem IMO is that there is an extreme
| lack of product leadership and product vision at the very
| top levels of the company. This results in a near-total
| inability to mitigate meta-hacks of internal promotion
| systems.
|
| At companies with more product strategy at some point
| someone at a high level goes "Projects X makes no damned
| sense!" and puts the kibosh on it. At Google Project X
| will ship, and then after its badness becomes
| inescapable, get shut down.
| arromatic wrote:
| This makes sense .
| abraae wrote:
| They may be concerned, but what can they do? Google has
| poisoned the well, and the entire web is now a swamp of SEO
| driven drivel.
|
| Forget about a "Jobs returning to Apple" miracle. As they say,
| "you can't get there from here". There's no easy path for
| Google back from the short term profit-driven corner they've
| painted all of us into.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| The web is over now. Google first, AI later killed any
| incentive to create content for the open web
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Perhaps you're talking about financial incentives. And if
| so, then _perhaps_ you might be right.
|
| But there are plenty of other incentives that AI hasn't
| touched at all.
| hinkley wrote:
| I knew Google had jumped the shark when Larry and Sergey
| started trying to convert a Boeing jet into a corporate jet.
|
| That was a couple of years before the rest of us started
| smelling smoke coming out.
| arromatic wrote:
| I am unable to understand your comment . Can you please
| explain a little bit more ?
| deanCommie wrote:
| Their passion and energy used to go into organizing the
| world's information and presenting it to google users at an
| unprecedented cost.
|
| Their passion and energy now goes into designing the most
| comfortable super jet for their free time.
|
| [is OP's implication, i have no idea if it's true]
| leephillips wrote:
| And they know exactly what's happening. In 2006 they said,
|
| "we expect that advertising funded search engines will be
| inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the
| needs of the consumers."
|
| http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-advertising-and-search-e...
| xjay wrote:
| I can imagine this happening in many places: 1) Idealist phase.
| 2) Hype phase. 3) Novelty wears off = Leave. 4) Bean counter
| phase. 5) ???
| arromatic wrote:
| What does it mean ?
| fidotron wrote:
| I have long suspected there is more to it than that, the
| giveaway being that once you are in what is currently the
| Alphabet level executive group a fundamentally different set of
| rules and standards are applied compared to what is considered
| allowed in Google, and these two did not used to be so
| divergent. This is a far dirtier game than many want to accept.
| arromatic wrote:
| Can you explain a bit more ?
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| You get older, you lose the willpower and energy to fight the
| machine
|
| They have enormous power, but they are now also up against vast
| armies of lawyers and executives and lobbyists who will whisper
| and whine in their ears all day
|
| Do I, Larry Page, really want to deal with all of that with my
| failing health and depleting energy?
| arromatic wrote:
| What are they whispering ? more profit or please rank my site
| or i will sue you .
| smt88 wrote:
| They don't care about Alphabet/Google at all. They've fully
| moved on.
|
| Even if Alphabet lost all its market value tomorrow, they've
| already cashed out enough of their stock to have thousands of
| lifetimes of money.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I assume their wealth is not particularly tied to Google stock.
| Eggs, baskets etc.
| sidcool wrote:
| Wow. This man seems to have a personal grudge against Raghavan. I
| knew people hate Pichai, but this brutal.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I'd feel bad, but then I thought that Raghavan probably has a
| PR service, and this is a fair counterbalance to that.
|
| PR needs short-sellers too.
| programjames wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Brutal? Yeah. But it's a great read.
| janalsncm wrote:
| If you have two people, one who wants to build a great product
| and the other who wants to climb the corporate ladder, the one
| climbing the ladder will always end up managing the one building
| great products.
| OnionBlender wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| rrrix1 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Agreed. I struggled to keep going after "computer scientist
| class traitor". A very juvenile take that reflects poorly on
| the author, IMO.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Hyperbole that is quite obviously hyperbole is a well
| accepted literary device. It is a form of highlight via
| creative exaggeration of non-critical points, that is
| transparent, not deceptive, in service of making serious
| adjacent points. [0]
|
| The point here is to highlight the actually cartoonish level
| of dysfunction and damage with an intentionally cartoonish
| flourish.
|
| The "villian" in this case can be colorfully interpreted as
| the real world isomorphism of a mustache stroking, side
| sneering perpetrator, from any usually fictional world-stakes
| good vs. evil story.
|
| Intentional exaggeration also communicates a bit of self-
| awareness, that gives heavy crisis alarms more credibility.
| The author's levity demonstrates a higher level awareness and
| humility, by making fun of his own extraordinarily serious
| thesis.
|
| Finally: gallows humor. Add humor when talking about
| depressing things to relieve the anxiety that often inhibits
| discussion and contemplation of difficult topics.
|
| [0] See famous "juvenile" writer Mark Twain.
| romanhn wrote:
| Hyperbole is well and good in fiction and personal opinion
| pieces. I suppose my, and parent commenter's issue, is that
| we expected a certain type of writing, but got another. And
| that's fine. I don't have a dog in this fight, but to me it
| went beyond hyperbole and into personal attack territory. I
| called it juvenile because the descriptors lack nuance in
| the same way that "management bad, programmer good"
| arguments do. Having spent quite a bit of time on both
| sides, it's pretty clear that motivations, incentives, and
| constraints are not black and white, so I'm a bit more
| sensitive when I see people mocked without having full
| context.
| jrflowers wrote:
| > people mocked without having full context
|
| This is a good point. This 3700 word article titled "The
| Man Who Killed Google Search" about Prabhakar Raghavan
| does not contain context for why the author would dislike
| Prabhakar Raghavan or speak ill of him professionally.
| romanhn wrote:
| To be clear, I meant the author does not have full
| context.
| jrflowers wrote:
| That makes sense. It is possible that Google search got
| better and not worse since it was taken over by the guy
| that used to run Yahoo search, in which case context
| would thoroughly vindicate the choice to promote SEO spam
| sites and make ads and search results nearly
| indistinguishable.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| This is like that scene in the Simpsons where Lisa tries
| to teach Homer that correlation does not equal causation
| by telling him that a rock keeps bears away, and he
| responds by wanting to buy the rock.
|
| Correlation isn't causation. Don't just buy that someone
| is fully to blame because someone told you they were
| fully to blame.
| davidgerard wrote:
| I notice you're not supplying that alleged "full
| context".
| romanhn wrote:
| Obviously I don't have it. The author doesn't either and
| he is the one making the big claims. Regardless, I'm not
| arguing the extent to which Prabhakar Raghavan
| contributed to Google Search quality, I haven't even
| heard the name before this post. I'm not a fan of the
| writing style, that is all.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > Hyperbole that is quite obviously hyperbole
|
| It's not at all obvious that the author intends to sound
| hyperbolic. At the risk of Poe's Law here, they _come
| across_ as saying exactly what they intend to say, perhaps
| attempting to appeal to an audience looking for such
| portrayals.
| akaij wrote:
| I thought it was a very good description. The person
| mentioned is responsible for turning one of the most
| important pieces of software used by billions, into user-
| hostile experiences that's better for only a few, including
| himself, just for profits.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| As context, I offer the engineer oath used by some
| countries for certified engineers:
|
| >> _I am an Engineer. In my profession, I take deep pride.
| To it, I owe solemn obligations._
|
| >> _As an engineer, I pledge to practice integrity and fair
| dealing, tolerance and respect, and to uphold devotion to
| the standards and dignity of my profession. I will always
| be conscious that my skill carries with it the obligation
| to serve humanity by making the best use of the Earth 's
| precious wealth._
|
| >> _As an engineer, I shall participate in none but honest
| enterprises. When needed, my skill and knowledge shall be
| given, without reservation, for the public good. In the
| performance of duty, and in fidelity to my profession, I
| shall give my utmost._
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Engineer#Oath
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| This here is one of the reasons I reject the title
| "software engineer".
| dekhn wrote:
| I woudl not sign that, and would instead call myself a
| computer programmer. That is an absolutely absurd set of
| sentences to sign one's name to.
| kelnos wrote:
| And I wouldn't want to work with someone who would balk
| at something like that.
| sophacles wrote:
| Why?
| dekhn wrote:
| Because it's too vacuous and based on subjective morals
| to be realistically followed. I also think we need
| engineers who do jobs that are ugly to preserve our
| freedom.
| robryk wrote:
| I don't see why subjective morals cannot be realistically
| followed. Do you mean that it will mean sufficiently
| different things for different people that they any
| promise of this shape will not communicate much to
| strangers, or something else?
| chasd00 wrote:
| on example i see, "When needed, my skill and knowledge
| shall be given, without reservation, for the public good"
|
| who decides they're needed? me, or some other form of
| authority? "shall be given"... as in no compensation just
| forced to work? "the public good", what does that even
| mean? like software for homeless shelters or national
| defense? Does designing AI for targeting enemies for
| bombing count as public good? In many eyes it does and in
| many eyes it does not.
| rfrey wrote:
| Luckily for you, there's no professional engineering
| society on the planet that considers computer programming
| to be engineering.
| sevagh wrote:
| The presence of an oath doesn't prevent traditional
| certified engineers from causing harm. It's just a goofy
| ritual.
| kelnos wrote:
| I'm sure it does prevent _some_ harm that would otherwise
| happen. There are certainly people in the world who would
| think twice about breaking an oath they 've made,
| regardless of whether or not you think it's goofy.
|
| And I think that is really part of the problem. The idea
| that something like this is "goofy" just makes me feel
| profoundly sad. Do people just not care about integrity
| anymore, to the point that asking someone to declare
| their intent to do their work with honesty is considered
| silly and pointless?
|
| We truly live in a cynical world.
| dekhn wrote:
| Perhaps the people who think it's goofy may have actually
| put some thought behind their statements and have good
| reasons? For example, I find the oath as written to be
| effectively impossible to implement- it's very lofty
| sounding, but depends greatly on the nature of "honesty":
|
| "I shall participate in none but honest enterprises"
|
| Who defines honesty in this context? What if two
| engineers disagree in their interpretation and come to
| different conclusions? The statements in this are so
| vague as to simply not be implementable in any sort of
| self-consistent way. Signing a vacuous unimplementable
| statement isn't integrity, it's mindless follower
| behavior.
|
| Many of us act with integrity without signing oaths of
| loyalty.
| romanhn wrote:
| "Honest enterprises" also falls into the trap of
| anthropomorphizing organizations. Companies are not
| people and cannot be honest/dishonest, moral/immoral,
| etc. Companies are made up of people who choose to take
| certain positions and actions. The oath sounds nice, but
| ultimately is empty.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _Signing a vacuous unimplementable statement isn 't
| integrity, it's mindless follower behavior._
|
| Aspirational ethics exist outside of verifiable
| scenarios.
| sevagh wrote:
| I was part of one of these oaths, I have an iron ring
| (Canada). It's just, look around you. Every bridge
| collapse, every oil spill had some "certified oathkeeper"
| or a team of them behind it.
|
| The presence of a ceremony - no matter how important it
| was in the past - just doesn't hold value anymore. I
| doubt that Professional Engineers(TM) that have signed
| the oath are among us operating on a higher plane of
| morality and gravitas. They're, most likely, by Occam's
| razor, just another person.
|
| The idea that any amount of my peers (or myself) present
| at the same ceremony take this oath seriously is
| laughable. It's a wine and cheese event before you get
| your degree, nothing more.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > ..just for profits.
|
| well let's be honest, Google was never founded to dig wells
| or feed starving children. It was only ever for the
| profits.
|
| Also, in their defense, afaik no one's paychecks have ever
| bounced. I bet many many people would become very
| interested in profit and its growth if their direct deposit
| all of a sudden stopped.
| akaij wrote:
| I'm talking about the difference between making money off
| a good product, and being on a quest to enrich yourself
| at all costs, even if it's detrimental to virtually
| everyone on the planet, and the company in the long term.
| joenot443 wrote:
| You don't find it to be succinct? It's certainly pejorative,
| but in four words it explains quite nicely how the author
| feels about Raghaven in a way most engineers can probably
| relate to. If he'd said "engineer who no longer builds but
| leverages their past technical background to instead succeed
| in a management role, often to the detriment of their past
| engineering peers" it would roughly get the same idea across,
| it's just a chore to read.
|
| Personally I don't mind that sort of colloquial flare, it
| reads like I'm talking with a real person rather than a
| design document.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Anyone who talks about class traitors, or almost any sort
| of traitor, outside of a real war, is deeply misguided on
| this point.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| I was strongly motivated to upvote and share this article. I
| probably upvote and share 1/500 articles I read on this
| website. So I disagree, I think his tone helps convey how the
| bulk of people feel about Google's search product and gives us
| a name to actually blame. Whereas every other blog writes about
| the decline of Google with a sad tone underwritten with
| nostalgia and always fails to provide any sort of root cause or
| solution, atleast this guy has given us good information and
| context to understand Googles decline. And of course, it's more
| entertaining when people are called out.
| neilv wrote:
| > _and gives us a name to actually blame._
|
| Understanding the dynamics is great, and we can learn from
| that, and apply it to other situations.
|
| As for who to blame for something a company does, shouldn't
| outsiders blame the entire company? That's our interface, and
| also how we can hold the company accountable for its
| collective behavior.
|
| It's also a defense against scapegoating: it wasn't just one
| person who made a unilateral decision, and everyone else --
| up to and including the board, as well as down the tree, to
| those who knew and could walk and/or whistleblow -- was
| totally powerless. The company as an entity is responsible,
| and a lot of individuals were key or complicit.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| > shouldn't outsiders blame the entire company
|
| No, I firmly believe that this level of indirection over-
| diffuses responsibility in a way that enables the
| malfeseance we're observing.
|
| It's a social dark pattern that I'm keen to identify and
| disrupt.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| Yes, I agree with you but it goes both ways.
|
| I had the unfortunate experience of running a startup
| with a couple of guys from a name brand fintech. They
| absolutely demolished the company before we got our first
| sale.
|
| I couldn't quite work out if these guys learned their
| mendacious trade from $bigcorp or if $bigcorps simply
| attract these kind of people.
|
| My sense is that it's a bit from both columns - I think
| that huge, profit driven megacorps, in general, are bad
| for society, in part because corporate culture itself is
| rapacious, and in part because they deliver enormous
| power into the hands of incredibly selfish people.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| _You need to do both_
|
| The company should be held responsible for bad actions
| AND so should the individuals.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Absolutely true
| yifanl wrote:
| I disagree, because this ends up with implying that if
| you just got rid of That One Fucking Guy, then everything
| with Google Search would be good.
|
| Which... is not a claim I'd agree with without extremely
| convincing evidence.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Someone can still be responsible for decisions made in a
| system with poor incentives.
| potatolicious wrote:
| Ehh, I don't think that's really what it implies.
|
| It implies that getting rid of That Fucking Guy is a
| necessary but likely insufficient condition for improving
| things.
|
| Orgs that have been dysfunctional for a long time tend to
| have very complex dysfunctions, but there are still ways
| to fix these orgs, and it often starts by removing poor
| leadership from their posts.
|
| Does it immediately make everything sunshine and
| lollipops? Of course not, but removing leadership that's
| actively working to counter your goals is still a
| necessary step towards the greater goal.
|
| I think there are often two camps when it comes to
| organizational dynamics: "Team Incentives" (everything is
| about org structure and incentives) vs. "Team Great
| Person" (everything is about a small set of specific
| high-level people)
|
| The reality is often somewhere in between. IMO "Team
| Incentives" often errs too much in that belief -
| especially because dysfunctional incentives are often
| downstream from a surprisingly small number of people.
| xkbarkar wrote:
| Yeah I agree. The personal tone makes it clear that this is
| the authors' opinion and not unbiased fact. I thoroughly
| enjoyed the article and the writing style. Excellent job.
| taco_emoji wrote:
| this is such a tiresome criticism. "this would be better if it
| were more boring" yeah okay and 4 people would read it and 2 of
| them would fall asleep during
| its_ethan wrote:
| And your criticism of him is what? Encourage more
| sensationalism? Because there's so much evidence of that
| being such good and healthy way for journalism/news to
| operate?
| saganus wrote:
| Just to chime in, I started reading the article due to this
| comment, as I wanted to check the style of the writing, but the
| amount of in-your-face insistence to subscribe to yet another
| newsletter just put me off entirely.
|
| There was a CTA right at the beginning (which appeared suddenly
| after 4-5 seconds of reading so I lost my place), then another
| one a few paragraphs later, then less than 3 seconds after
| that, a pop-up to subscribe!
|
| At that point I was so annoyed I just scrolled to the end to
| see how many more of these distractions I would have to endure,
| and then I found _yet_ another one and ALSO a bottom bar?
|
| What gives? Is this really useful anymore? do people that
| subscribe after being harassed like this actually care about
| your articles?
|
| I try to ignore these as much as possible, but holy cow, I just
| want to read this one article and maybe later _if_ I find it
| interesting I might read a couple more and THEN actually
| subscribe.
|
| I am really annoyed by the amount of distracting stuff these
| "blogs" put in front you as if they wanted you to avoid reading
| the material. What is wrong with these people?
| kelnos wrote:
| Aside from the annoying pop-up, I didn't actually notice the
| other calls to subscribe.
|
| It's a bit of an unfortunate situation for the author, if any
| reasonable number of people are like me. If I didn't notice
| the less-intrusive efforts to get me to subscribe, and when I
| see the intrusive one (the modal pop-up), it makes me _less_
| likely to want to subscribe... oof.
|
| I think the theoretical ideal from the reader's standpoint is
| that there's just one call to subscribe, at the very end, the
| idea being that if you can't make it to the end of the
| article, you probably aren't going to subscribe anyway.
|
| And yet so many sites still do the modal pop-up that
| interrupts you while you're reading. So clearly they must
| work, at least well enough to get people to sign up? Then
| again, I do wonder how many people are so turned off by those
| pop-ups, people who would have subscribed, but decide not to?
| mrandish wrote:
| I agree and it's especially frustrating because it's such a
| vital topic. Since at least ~2020 the utility of Google Search
| has declined dramatically and it appears much of the cause is
| actions intentionally taken by Google prioritizing short-term
| ad revenue over long-term user value.
|
| There was likely a significant change in cultural priorities
| inside Google driving this. While one person can certainly
| contribute to such a cultural change, it would be a better
| article if it focused on the change in cultural values itself.
| kelnos wrote:
| I thought it was written very well, and was engaging. I could
| easily imagine it being dry and boring, otherwise, something
| that wouldn't hold my attention long enough to read through it
| to the end.
| davidgerard wrote:
| The problem there is that nobody wrote that article, someone
| did write this one. You should ask yourself why that is.
| lo_fye wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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.
| t43562 wrote:
| 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.
| vvpan wrote:
| There is an article called "The man that killed X" for every X.
| jwoq9118 wrote:
| Including X (formerly called Twitter)
| paxys wrote:
| Wow, weird that $300B+ in revenue is just showing up in Google's
| bank account every year even without an active search engine.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Why do you think they bought Android and built Chrome? :)
| ot1138 wrote:
| 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.
| arromatic wrote:
| 1. Do you know what caused it ? 2. How did the hostility look
| like ? 3. How did you circumvented them ? 4. What did your
| search service do ?
| ot1138 wrote:
| I don't know what caused it but I suspected at the time, and
| still do, that it was simply business people getting more
| involved in order to drive growth.
|
| The hostility was simply this. One day we had a dedicated
| high level Google engineer helping us out and giving us
| guidance (and even special tags) to get the data we needed in
| a cost effective manner for both Google and us. The next day,
| he was gone and we received demands to know exactly what we
| were doing, why and even sensitive information about our
| business. After several months of such probing, we were
| summarily told that the access we had was revoked and that
| there was no recourse.
|
| We circumvented by setting up thousands of unique IP
| addresses in 50+ countries throughout the world and pointing
| our spiders at Google through them (same as they do to
| everyone else). These were throttled to maintain very low
| usage rates and stay off the radar. We continually refilled
| our queues with untouched IPs in case any were ever
| blacklisted (which happened occasionally).
|
| As for what we did, we sampled ads for every keyword under
| the sun, aggregated and analyzed them to find out what was
| working and what wasn't. This even led to methods for
| estimating advertiser budgets. At one point, we had virtually
| every Google advertiser and their ongoing monthly spend,
| keywords and ad copy in our database. Highly valuable to
| smart marketers who were looking for an edge.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I'm really glad the article came out though, it fills in some
| gaps that I was fairly confident about but didn't have anything
| other than my sense of the players and their actions to back up
| what I thought was going on.
|
| I and a number of other people left in 2010. I went on to work
| at Blekko which was trying to 'fix' search using a mix of
| curation and ranking.
|
| When I left, this problem of CPC's (the amount Google got per
| ad click in search) was going down (I believe mostly because of
| click fraud and advertisers losing faith in Google's metrics).
| While they were reporting it in their financial results, I had
| made a little spreadsheet[1] from their quarterly reports and
| you can see things tanking.
|
| I've written here and elsewhere about it, and watched from the
| outside post 2010 and when people were saying "Google is going
| to steam roll everyone" I was saying, "I don't think so, I
| think unless they change they are dead already." There are lots
| of systemic reasons inside Google why it was hard for them to
| change and many of their processes reinforced the bad side of
| things rather than the good side. The question for me has
| always been "Will they pull their head out in time to recover?"
| recognizing that to do that they would have to be a lot more
| honest internally about their actions than they were when I was
| there. I was also way more pessimistic, figuring that they
| would be having company wide layoffs by 2015 to 2017 but they
| pushed that out by 5 years.
|
| I remember pointing out to an engineering director in 2008 that
| Google was living in the dead husk of SGI[2] which caused them
| to laugh. They re-assured me that Google was here to stay. I
| pointed out that Wei Ting told me the same thing about SGI when
| they were building the campus. (SGI tried to recruit me from
| Sun which had a campus just down the road from where Google is
| currently.)
|
| [1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18_y-
| Zyhx-5a1_kcW-x7p...
|
| [2] Silicon Graphics --
| https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/peninsula-high-tech...
| arromatic wrote:
| How did the slashtag feature worked and what did it do ? It
| seems like a interesting concept but sadly the site is dead .
| What happened to it ?
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| People would add sites for a particular topic (aka
| slashtag) to their list. That would build a virtual custom
| search engine within the search engine. And topic specific
| searches thrown at it would consistently out perform Bing
| and Google in terms of search quality. The meta "spam"
| slash tag (everyone got their own) would let you tell the
| engine sites you never wanted to see in your search results
| so if you were tired of your medical queries being spammed
| by quacks, add them to your spam list and they wouldn't be
| in your results.
| leoc wrote:
| FWIW, I've wanted things like that for so long. I'm sad
| that I never even heard of Blekko.
| maxerickson wrote:
| What is definition of dead? 15 years later they have huge
| majority of traffic share and lots of revenue.
| sevagh wrote:
| Number of HN complaints per day posted.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| You know how a chess player will say something like "mate
| in 6" because their experience of all the options left to
| their opponent are both easily countered and will not
| prevent them from losing? Companies, and tech companies in
| my experience, get into death spirals due to a combination
| of people, culture, and organization. Pulling out of one of
| those is possible but requires a unique combination of
| factors and a strong leadership team to pull off. Something
| that is very hard to put into place when the existing
| leadership has overriding voting power. You can look at GE,
| IBM, and to some extent AT&T as companies that have "re-
| invented" themselves or at least avoided dissolution into
| an over marketed brand.
|
| I have a strong memory of watching a Jacques Cousteau
| documentary on sharks and learning that Sharks could become
| mortally wounded but not realize it because of how their
| nervous system was structured. As a kid I thought that was
| funny, as an engineer watching companies in the Bay Area
| die it was more sobering.
|
| If you have read the article, I think Gomes was right and
| saw search as a product, whereas Raghavan saw it as a tool
| for shoveling ads. A good friend of mine who worked there
| until 2020 wouldn't tell me why they left, but acknowledged
| that it was this that finally "ruined" Google.
|
| Their cash cow is dying, I know from running a search
| engine what sort of revenue you can get from being "just
| one of the search engine choices" versus the 800lb gorilla.
| Advertisers are disillusioned, and structurally their
| company requires growth to support the stock price which
| supports their salary offerings. There is a nice
| supportable business for about 5,000 - 8,000 people there,
| but getting there from where they are?
|
| My best guess at the moment is that when they die, "for
| reals" as they say, their other bets will either be spun
| off or folded, their search team will get bought by Apple
| with enough infrastructure to run it, Amazon or someone
| else buys a bunch of data centers, and one of the media
| companies buys the youtube assets.
| iamthirsty wrote:
| > You know how a chess player will say something like
| "mate in 6" because their experience of all the options
| left to their opponent are both easily countered and will
| not prevent them from losing?
|
| As a chess person, saying "Mate in _" means it's a
| calculated inevitability. There is no mathematical way
| out of it.
|
| It is not nearly equivalent to the outside judgement of a
| company with so many factors -- it's just incomparable.
| narag wrote:
| Yes, but there are other positions that do fit the
| comparison, like a couple of advanced passed pawns that
| can still be defended against with surgical precision,
| but most times are lethal.
| iamthirsty wrote:
| Again, I think there is a misunderstanding of what the
| saying is used for.
|
| In chess, it's specifically used for saying "even with
| the best defense possible, you will be mated no mater
| what in a maximum of X moves." Computers use this
| definition as well. If Stockfish says # in 6, that means
| there is an indefensible path to mate available, and with
| the best play of the opponent will take 6 moves.
|
| It's not a "Mate in X, _probably_. "
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I don't disagree, chess is much more algorithmic and
| predictable. Maybe it is more like seeing your best mate
| of the last 20 years getting into their fourth or fifth
| relationship with the same kind of partner they failed
| with before and thinking, "Seen this movie before, it is
| not gonna work out." No algorithms, just you know how
| you're friend sabotages themselves and you also know they
| can't (or won't) look critically at that behavior, and so
| they are doomed to fail again.
|
| But I can guarantee you that Google employees are reading
| these comments and saying "Wow, this guy is totally full
| of it, he doesn't know about anything!" and for some of
| them that thought will arise not from flaws in what I and
| others are saying, but in the uncomfortable space of "if
| this is accurate my future plans I'm invested in are not
| going to happen..., this must be wrong." I have lived in
| that space with an early startup I helped start, when I
| went back and worked on the trauma it had caused me it
| taught me a lot about my willingness to ignore the
| thinking part of my brain when it conflicted with the
| emotional part.
|
| You have to do some of that to take risks, but you also
| have to recognize that they are risks. Painful lesson for
| me.
| temporarely wrote:
| Chuck, curious if you have ever posted here on what
| happened to Sun Micro. Love to read your take on it.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I don't think so. At one of the Sun Reunion events a
| bunch of us sat around and talked about it. I suggested
| someone should write a companion volume to "Sunrise: The
| first 10 years of Sun" called "Sunset: The last 10 years
| of Sun." But as far as I know nobody followed up (if they
| did they didn't reach out to me for my take)
| temporarely wrote:
| Quit teasing. Give us a taste, then. [:)]
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Companies this size die several years before the body hits
| the floor.
|
| They're dead when everyone starts to hate them and someone
| says "no, look how much money they're making, they're
| fine." That's the fatal blow, because they think they're
| fine, and keep doing the things that make everyone hate
| them.
|
| At that point you're just waiting for someone else to offer
| an alternative. Then people prefer the alternative because
| the incumbent has been screwing them for so long, and even
| if they change _at that point_ , it's too late because
| nobody likes or trusts them anymore, and ships that big
| can't turn on a dime anyway.
|
| You have to address the rot when customers start
| complaining about it, not after they've already switched to
| a competitor.
| eproxus wrote:
| The bigger the behemoth, the slower the fall.
| samch wrote:
| I know they aren't the same scale as Google, but what you
| wrote really describes Atlassian for me.
| rurp wrote:
| While I totally agree that Atlassian products are
| terrible and steadily getting even worse, I'm not sure
| they are going anywhere anytime soon given their
| disconnect between users and customers. Most people who
| have to suffer their products have no say in the
| purchasing decision, and the company does a somewhat
| better job of appealing to the relative small group that
| does. Atlassian could very well have Oracle-like staying
| power.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That sounds a lot like Kodak.
|
| I remember running into Kodak engineers, at an event in
| the 1990s, and they were _all_ complaining about the same
| thing.
|
| They were digital engineers, and they were complaining
| that film people kept sabotaging their projects.
|
| Kodak invented the digital camera. They should have ruled
| the roost (at least, until the iPhone came out). Instead,
| they imploded, almost overnight. The film part was highly
| profitable.
|
| Until it wasn't. By then, it was too late. They had
| cooked the goose.
| binarymax wrote:
| If they owned the digital camera space like they should
| have, who's to say they wouldn't have eventually released
| a smartphone. It probably would have been an absolutely
| incredible camera first, and some mobile internet and
| phone features second.
|
| One can really dream up a fascinating alternate timeline
| of iKodak if they didnt shoot themselves in the foot.
| SllX wrote:
| And even if they didn't, maybe it would be Kodak sensors
| in iPhones instead of Sony sensors. A lot of
| possibilities.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The just-so story about Kodak is one of those things that
| bugs me. Kodak did own the digital camera market, stem to
| stern, for years. They did not ignore it. They did,
| however, invent all that stuff a little early, before the
| semiconductor manufacturing technology had matured to the
| point where it could be a consumer good.
|
| The company imploded because it spent all of its time,
| attention, and capital trying to become a pharmaceutical
| factory, starting in the mid-1980s.
| binarymax wrote:
| Yeah, lots of things happened for a perfect storm of
| downfall...probably starting with the antitrust breakup
| of the film processing division.
|
| They did indeed have a huge patent arsenal from all their
| research efforts that was very valuable. They were also
| really good at consumer tech - so it's a shame it didn't
| amount to more.
| Certhas wrote:
| Any examples of this actually playing out with a company
| as established as Google? You can read comments like this
| on many companies... Microsoft (70B$ income), Meta
| (40B$), Oracle (8.5B$), IBM(7.5B$), SAP (6B$), yet none
| of them seem to ever actually enter the predicted death
| spiral.
|
| And the internet isn't new anymore. There is no vast
| landscape of unexplored new technological possibilities,
| and no garage start up with an engineering mindset that
| will just offer a better solution.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| AT&T, GE, AOL, Yahoo, Sony technology (they are a media
| company now, but they did used to make things that
| weren't a game console), Time Warner, SGI, Compaq, 3DFx,
| DEC...
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Not only that, most of the other examples are just not at
| the end of their death spiral yet. Take a look at Windows
| market share, it's down 20% over the last 10 years:
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-
| sha...
|
| And that's just desktop. Microsoft ceded the entire
| mobile market, which in turn now represents the majority
| of devices. The majority of the company's profits no
| longer come from selling Windows and Office. If they
| hadn't pivoted into a new line of business (Azure) they'd
| be on a trajectory to impact with the ground.
|
| IBM has been bleeding customers -- and business units --
| for decades. Their stock is flat, not even keeping up
| with inflation, compared to +300% over the last decade
| for the overall market. And they have no obvious path to
| redemption.
|
| Oracle is kind of an outlier because of the nature of
| their business. Their product has an extraordinarily high
| transition cost, so once you're locked in, they can
| fleece you pretty hard and still not have it cost more
| than the cost of paying database admins high hourly rates
| for many hours to transition to a different database.
| Then they focus their efforts on getting naive MBAs to
| make a one-time mistake with a long-term cost. Or just
| literal bribery:
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/27/sec-fines-
| oracle-23-million-...
|
| And even with that, their database market share has been
| declining and they're only making up the revenue in the
| same way as Microsoft through cloud services.
|
| Meta isn't a great example because people just don't hate
| them that much. Facebook sucks but in mostly the same
| ways as their major competitors, they're still run by the
| founder and they do things people like, like releasing
| LLaMA for free.
| bevekspldnw wrote:
| The majority of that revenue comes from violating data
| protection law and regulators and litigants are slowly
| racking up a series of wins which will gut ads margins.
|
| There is no Plan B, they are just going to break the law
| until they can't and there's zero clue what happens after
| that.
|
| They sat back and let OpenAI kick their ass precisely
| because ghouls like Prabakar call the shots and LLM are not
| a good display ads fit.
|
| The best parallel for Google is Kodak.
| bbor wrote:
| A) I think it's important to acknowledge that in many ways
| Google is actively _trying_ to keep CPC low - what they care
| most about is total spend. A low CPC means an effective
| advertising network where interested consumers are
| efficiently targeted. Their position is complex thanks to
| their monopoly status over online advertising.
|
| B) I don't think it's fair to characterize recent layoffs as
| some put-off collapse... criticize Google all you want for
| running a bad search engine, but right now they're still
| dominant and search is the most effective advertising known
| to man. They're raking in buckets of money: they had 54K
| employees on 01/01/2015, and _182K_ on 01 /01/2024.
| Similarly, they made 66B in 2014, and 305B in 2023. The
| latest layoffs are them cleaning house and scaring their
| workers into compliance, not the death throes of a company in
| trouble -- they're barely a dent in the exponential graphs: h
| ttps://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/numb..
| .
| candiodari wrote:
| A) This is short-sighted. What you're suggesting is in fact
| a way to optimize short-term gain over long-term viability.
| It's pure MBA tactics.
|
| Additionally, it's complete and total oversimplification.
| If you look at Google's earnings it's pretty damn clear
| that at least until 2020 they were not just going for
| maximum total spend, but for a steady, gradual raise in
| total spend. Not too slow, not too fast. They were NOT
| taking every opportunity they had, in fact they're famous
| for systematically refusing many opportunities (see the
| original founders' letter, but even after that). They were
| farming the ad market, the ad spend, growing it, nurturing
| it. Then COVID blew up the farm.
|
| Maybe you're right now, but I do hope they're recovering
| their old tactics. Because if they maximize it you'd see
| nothing but scams ... wait a second.
|
| B) Google was built by providing a vision, and getting out
| of the way of ground-up engineer efforts. "Scaring workers
| into compliance" IS killing the golden goose.
|
| You can see this in AI. Every story from an AI engineer
| that ran away from Google is the same. They didn't run away
| for the money, they ran away because they were getting
| scared into compliance.
|
| Now AI may make it, or not. I don't know. But this is
| happening EVERYWHERE in Google. Every effort. Every good
| idea, and every bad idea runs away, usually inside the mind
| of "a worker". Not to make them personally maximum money,
| but it's natural selection: if the idea doesn't run away,
| the engineer it's in is "scared into compliance", into
| killing the idea.
|
| Whatever the next big thing turns out to be, it simply
| cannot come out of Google. And it will hit suddenly, just
| like it did for Yahoo.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| > You can see this in AI. Every story from an AI engineer
| that ran away from Google is the same. They didn't run
| away for the money, they ran away because they were
| getting scared into compliance.
|
| Can you elaborate?
| swader999 wrote:
| Yeah, what is scared into compliance?
| candiodari wrote:
| Being pushed/forced to implement top-down efforts, forced
| to comply with management's directives instead of being
| empowered to build things bottom-up
|
| https://sifted.eu/articles/deepmind-talent
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-researcher-quit-
| google-op...
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/features/2023-07-13/ex-
| goo...
|
| https://mdwdotla.medium.com/why-im-leaving-google-for-a-
| star...
| bbor wrote:
| Totally agree on the overall prognosis of Google - I am
| (also?) one of said engineers! Here's a recent update
| from a tiny corner of the company: the rank and file is
| still incredibly smart and generally well-intentioned,
| but are following hollow simulacrums of the original
| culture - all-hands, dogfooding, internal feedback, and
| ground-up engineering priorities are all maintained in
| form, but they are now rendered completely functionless.
| I am personally convinced that the company is -- or _was_
| , before ChatGPT really took off - focused on immediate
| short term stock value above all else. After all, if you
| were looking down the barrel of multiple federal and EU
| antritrust suits and dwindling public support for the
| utility you own and operate, you might do the same...
|
| I guess I'm standing up for the simple idea that terribly
| inefficient organizations can prevail when they're the
| incumbents, at least for significant periods if not
| forever. We can't be complacent and assume they'll fall
| on their own, esp when AGI threatens social calcification
| on an unheard of scale.
| iamthirsty wrote:
| > I was also way more pessimistic, figuring that they would
| be having company wide layoffs by 2015 to 2017 but they
| pushed that out by 5 years.
|
| Well in 2011 Google had just over 30k employees, and now
| they're doing "layoffs" with 180k+ in 2024. I don't think the
| layoffs mean much.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Did I mention I was more pessimistic? :-) I expect that
| _today_ they could layoff 150k, keep the 30K that are
| involved with search and enough ads that are making
| business and that husk would do okay for a long time. I don
| 't suppose you watched SGI die, that happened to them, kind
| of spiraled into a core that has some money making business
| and then lived on that.
|
| One of my observations between "early" Google and "late"
| Google (and like the grandparent post I see 2010 as a
| pretty key point in their evolution) was employee
| "efficiency." I don't know if you've ever been in that
| situation where someone leaves a company and the company
| ends up hiring two or three people to replace them because
| of all the things they were doing. Not 10x engineers but
| certainly 3 - 5x engineers. Google starting losing lots of
| those in that decade. They had gone through the "Great
| Repricing" in 2008 when Google lowered the strike price on
| thousands of share options. And having been there 5 to 10
| years had enough wealth built up in Google stock that for a
| modest level of "this isn't fun any more" could just do
| that.
|
| But aside from your observation that "they have plenty of
| people" it is similar to observing that a plane that has
| lost its engine at 36,000' has "plenty of altitude" both
| true and less helpful than "and here is the process we're
| going to use as we fall out of the sky to get the engines
| back on."
|
| Google has lots of resources. If you have ever read about
| IBM reinventing itself in the 90's its quite interesting to
| note that had IBM not owned a ton of real estate it likely
| would not have had the resources to restructure itself. I
| worked with an executive at IBM who was part of that
| restructuring and it really impressed on me how important
| "facing reality" was at a corporation, and looking at the
| situation more realistically. I had started trying to get
| Google to do that but gave up when Alan Eustace explained
| that he understood my argument but they weren't going to do
| any of the things I had recommended. At that point its like
| "Okay then, have fun." Still, at some point, they could.
| They could figure out exactly what their "value add" is and
| the big E economics of their business and realign to focus
| on that. Their 'mission oriented' statement suggests that
| they are paying some attention to that idea now. But to
| really pull it off a lot of smart, self-interested, and
| low-EQ people are going to have to come to terms with being
| wrong about a lot of stuff. _That_ is what I don 't see
| happening and so I'm not really expecting them to
| transform. Both not enough star bits and the luma are just
| not hungry enough.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| How many companies have management consultants taken down? It's
| quite amazing how bad they are at anything. Peter Thiel's
| hatred for consultants is really legit.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I enjoy reading this chap's stuff. It's not the way that I
| would write, but he's got a much broader audience than I do, so
| he obviously is meeting the needs of the reading population.
|
| I do feel that I can't argue with his stuff, although it is
| very dark and cynical (and, truth be told, I have a lot of dark
| and cynical, in me, as well, but I try not to let it come out
| to play, too often).
| wrs wrote:
| This sounds an awful lot like the Boeing story, even including
| the "[engineering] class traitor" running the failing division.
| mulmen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Fair point, thanks for the clarification.
| senderista wrote:
| The MAX was exactly what their customers wanted.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Welch and Reagan teamed up to destroy the middle class.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This was a good one: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-rot-
| economy/
| itronitron wrote:
| I switched over to DDG sometime in 2017 or 2018, haven't used
| Google Search since.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You explained DDG really well.DDG has so much potential to
| innovate with a sufficiently large user base and popularity .
| terribleperson wrote:
| No, it was definitely that good. I remember finding a web
| page as a child (I think it was some weird webpage about
| medieval siege weaponry). Several years later, as a teenager,
| I wanted to find it again. With the right tweaking of search
| terms, I was able to find the same dang site. This actually
| happened more than once with multiple topics. If the site was
| still around, it was findable.
|
| Now? Google search shows you what it wants you to, and damn
| anything else.
|
| It's not entirely Google's fault - the web has gotten worse.
| But they take a large share of the blame, and I believe that
| their failures have played a role in making the web worse.
| reshie wrote:
| DDG uses bing as it's backend.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Anybody have a better title? 'Better' here means (1) less baity;
| (2) more accurate and neutral; and (3) preferably a
| representative phrase from the article itself.
|
| "The man who killed Google Search" is too baity. See the 'unless'
| in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: " _Please
| use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait_ "
|
| Edit (since there are objections): I'm not taking a position for
| or against the article; I haven't read it. This is just bog-
| standard HN moderation regarding titles. I skimmed the article
| looking for a representative phrase and couldn't find one on
| first pass. That is rather unusual and when it happens I
| sometimes ask the community for help.
|
| Edit 2: since there's no consensus on this I'm just going to
| reify that fact via the trailing-question-mark trick and call it
| a day.
| guardiangod wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Since killing != killed, your comment already shows that the
| title is misleading.
| abtinf wrote:
| 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"
| taco_emoji wrote:
| "Linkbait" implies it's hyperbole, but I would argue that the
| headline is a perfect description of the argument being made
| here.
| dang wrote:
| Linkbait is about using tricks to grab attention rather than
| providing neutral information. Hyperbole is only one way to
| do that.
|
| In this case "The man who" is a linkbait trope and "killed"
| is a sensational attention-grabby word. Composing them into
| "the man who killed" is linkbait.
| Takennickname wrote:
| "Prabhakar made search bad"
| netvarun wrote:
| I agree - and flagged it as a result. It is clearly a hit piece
| and has promptly even made it to Prabhakar's wikipedia page:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prabhakar_Raghavan
| grugq wrote:
| "Prabhakar Raghavan is killing Google"
|
| "Google's Death from Within: Prabhakar Raghavan"
|
| "Blame Prabhakar Raghavan for Google's Crappy Search"
|
| "Google Sucks. Because of Prabhakar Raghavan"
|
| "Prabhakar Raghavan is the man killing Google Search."
|
| "Yahoo Search Killer Prabhakar Raghavan Turns Death Ray on
| Google"
|
| "Prabhakar Raghavan and the no good very bad Google search."
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| "Prabhakar Raghavan is a bad man" :)
| panopticon wrote:
| He accidentally hit me with his sock in a Google gym back
| when he was VP of Apps. Very bad man indeed.
| ljm wrote:
| The number of times his name is repetitively mentioned in the
| article makes me read it in the voice of Stewart Lee.
| pjlegato wrote:
| "Google ad revenue stalled, so they made SERPs worse on
| purpose"
| Jasper_ wrote:
| > I'm not taking a position for or against the article; I
| haven't read it.
|
| If you haven't read it, why are you in a position to suggest
| whether the title is accurate to the article's contents or not?
| davidgerard wrote:
| This implies that posting a multi-paragraph comment on an
| article without bothering to read it, as dang did here, is
| the standard that HN should aspire to going forward.
| dang wrote:
| I didn't post about the article. I posted about how to
| moderate the title on HN, which is my job, and which does
| not require reading every article*, though it does require
| skimming some of them.
|
| * Moderation would be impossible if it did.
| dang wrote:
| I didn't read it, I skimmed it. In this context, "read" means
| "read it enough to form my own view of the story"; "skim"
| means "read it enough for moderation purposes", such as title
| editing.
|
| Moderating a site like HN relies heavily on the fact that
| these two are not the same! It is impossible to read all the
| articles; but it is possible to skim enough of them to make
| moderation feasible. (That has a beneficial side effect btw:
| not having my own opinion about a story makes it easier to
| not moderate according to my own opinion. I still do that, or
| try my best to, even when I do have an opinion--but it takes
| more ATP.)
|
| (Actually, I did end up reading the OP out of curiosity
| later. My own view of the story is that I am pretty persuaded
| by it. At the same time, I don't like the personal attack
| aspect, which is present in the article and which shows up as
| a mob dynamic in this thread. None of that is relevant to the
| question of the title though.)
| nbittich wrote:
| 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.
| hughesjj wrote:
| Kagi ftw
| imzadi wrote:
| I just recently switched to Kagi. It's worth paying a few bucks
| to get decent results.
| ianbutler wrote:
| I find myself seeing nothing useful on Kagi, going to Google,
| seeing nothing useful, then asking ChatGPT and sometimes
| seeing something useful and othertimes being led on a wild
| goose chase. The general state of information retrieval seems
| bleak. Reddit is usually the solution for me, even on
| technical matters now.
| hattmall wrote:
| I typically go google -> yandex -> kagi -> chatgpt.
| ametrau wrote:
| This describes my own experience 100% accurately.
| scarfacedeb wrote:
| The same for me. I tried it for a month and it just didn't
| work well enough to make a switch :/
| kelnos wrote:
| Strange, I rarely don't find what I need on Kagi, and when
| I do and fall back to Google, the results there are no more
| helpful.
| dingnuts wrote:
| this is my experience as well. sometimes I accidentally
| search Google and I find it extremely annoying and the
| results to be demonstrably worse most of the time
|
| the example I like to show people is searching "how to
| fix a leaky faucet"
|
| Kagi shows helpful answers and videos from sites like
| This Old House.
|
| Google shows ads for plumbers near me. If I had wanted a
| plumber, I would've searched for that.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| These days I go chatgpt4 -> ddg -> Google. I did the Kagi
| trial but it wasn't compelling.
|
| I am generally sceptical of GPT results, but also of other
| results, and GPT search is easier to fine tune and drill
| down into. For example if it gives me an obviously wrong
| answer, you can call BS. And it even apologises! Much more
| difficult to do for search engines.
| foobarian wrote:
| Search engines worked a lot better when the internet had a
| higher SNR in the link graph. Nowadays it's an ocean of SEO
| sewage and no search engine can do a good job. It's not
| that Google ruined search by showing ads; it has genuinely
| become a harder problem. There is not much that can be done
| except set up a federated darknet where any commercial
| activity is banned; otherwise, the incentives are all
| wrong.
| hedora wrote:
| Append a "?" to the end of the kagi query. It runs what
| appears to be a ChatGPT RAG query backed by a search engine
| index, and puts the results at the top of the normal search
| engine result page. It greatly outperforms any other LLM
| I've played with, and, as a bonus, each paragraph in the
| response contains working hyperlinks to primary sources.
|
| If you don't want to pay Kagi or login, you can play with
| it here:
|
| https://kagi.com/fastgpt
|
| (no need to append "?" when you run queries through that
| form).
| NegatioN wrote:
| I didn't know it runs an LLM when you append a "?", but
| for any Kagi-users out there, you can use the bang: !fgpt
| $QUERY if you automatically want to jump to an LLM.
|
| The !fgpt-bang seems to be the model: "Claude 3 Haiku"
| going by the developer notes. Which often outperforms at
| least ChatGPT 3.5, easily recouping some of the money I
| put into Kagi every month.
| imzadi wrote:
| Kagi lets me raise and lower sites or even block sites, so
| I get results more relevant to me. If I see a site that is
| not useful (hello Quora) I can block them. If I see
| something I like, I can raise it.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Agreed
| ed_mercer wrote:
| Kagi seems to have their heads up their asses though.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40011314
| yesco wrote:
| One dude's crappy blog doesn't change the fact that Kagi
| has excellent search results.
| gambiting wrote:
| I've literally made the jump last week and switched all my
| defaults over to bing, after Google couldn't find the simplest
| query I had about a video game that Bing found in first result.
| I'm just so done with google.
| its_ethan wrote:
| For what it's worth, I have the opposite issue - when I can't
| find what I'm looking for on more privacy focused search
| engines, I go to google because 99 times out of 100 it gives me
| what I'm looking for in the easiest/quickest way.
| wslh wrote:
| I tried to lie to myself because Google occupies a lot of good
| emotions and I have great memories, but it is incredible how
| many searches were replaced by a simple prompt to ChatGPT,
| except when I add a site:reddit.com to my Google search.
|
| For example, if I want to benchmark products I go directly to
| some subreddits and make my own benchmark spreadsheet.
| resource_waste wrote:
| I'm like this with Microsoft products. Anytime I need to buy
| one, I'm so worried I'm going to buy the wrong one. Once I have
| it, I'm worried its attached to the wrong account. Once I run
| it, I'm worried it wont start and I'll need to install it
| through some weird microsoft store. Then when its working, I'm
| worried my OS is going to slow down because of telemetry
| reporting. And I really hope microsoft team screen share works
| during an important meeting.
|
| Google is disappointing. Microsoft actually makes me scared.
| Fortunately Apple hasnt really made its way into corporate
| life, so I've been spared their punishments.
| y04nn wrote:
| This is my experience too, I'm baffled that when making a basic
| search about a programming language on Google, the top results
| are only SEO garbage that waste your time for a basic answer.
| I'm better off asking GPT those days.
| o9aswjl5wj4 wrote:
| Then why use it? I switched to DuckDuckGo years ago and it's
| fine.
| rrrix1 wrote:
| 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
| autokad wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I would like it if they would actually respect the weird
| syntax consistently
| drowsspa wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Indeed, AI is immensely useful! I use it every day too.
|
| However, it's been my experience that finding original works,
| perhaps that I can cite as a source, is somewhat difficult
| when the computer might confabulate both the content and the
| citations.
|
| When LLMs get (much) better at doing math, law and medicine,
| I'll be much more likely to use them for those things.
| autokad wrote:
| @drowsspa
|
| I don't use bing search, I use chatgpt and claude.
|
| Here are some examples: after pasting hundreds of log lines
| of output from a failed build request, "why did this build
| fail?"
|
| After pasting my last 3 workouts, "I am wondering if I am not
| putting enough muscle on my body / torso. Is this the case?
| if so, suggest me an exercise that utilizes body weight,
| dumbbells, or weighted exercise ball"
|
| It suggested dumbbell pull over, so I asked "What weight
| should I start with for the dumbbell pull over?"
|
| "say I want to go to the club and seem like I know what I am
| doing, how many dances should I know?"
|
| "say I have a pandas series of numpy.ndarray, and I have an
| numpy.ndarray. I want to find the cosine distance between the
| numpy.ndarray and each of the items in the series"
|
| "I made a notebook for non data scientists to follow and use,
| so I want to add lots of comments and mark down
| documentation." (paste notebook code) and it adds comments,
| doc strings, etc.
|
| most of this stuff, using search as it is, is clunky. I would
| have to find weird ways to word what I am searching for to
| find results.
| imp0cat wrote:
| Have you tried Phind? I find that it takes most of the
| "clunkiness" out of the process of searching by
| interrogating AI + searching the web at the same time.
| dandy23 wrote:
| Kagi is still a good search engine though. Hopefully they
| continue to improve that part too, even if they do AI stuff.
| bradleyankrom wrote:
| Another upvote for Kagi. I've been using it for a few months
| and have been happy with the experience. They do have some AI
| features/interests, but I'm optimistic that the products they
| develop will serve me/users. So far, so good.
| adishy wrote:
| Yes, and it's possible to turn off the AI / automated summary
| features if you don't like them as well.
| dcminter wrote:
| It's not just you, but perhaps there aren't enough of us to
| make this commercially viable?
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| Here's my requirement: if I'm using a VPN, don't constantly ask
| me to do CAPTCHA.
| mtsr wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that's mostly down to who your VPN is having
| you share IPs with. It's hard to limit unwanted traffic while
| not impacting regular VPN users.
|
| More annoying to me is getting captchas constantly just for
| running a recursive dns resolver. That's a normal piece of
| internet infrastructure and is well-behaved.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| I just want a search engine that prioritizes small sites again
|
| I just don't want to see another webmd fluff article when I
| search for a medical query or some gigantic news site's
| affiliate section when I search for a product
|
| Half my searches have site:reddit.com appended to them
| brtkdotse wrote:
| At this point I'm not even sure there is anything to find. The
| web as we remember seem to have withered away, suffocated by
| SEO optimized content farms
| durandal1 wrote:
| Kagi is sure interested in the role of AI in searching, but the
| fact is that their product works great, so why the negativity?
| mulmen wrote:
| Talk about finding what you are looking for. What does that
| search even tell us? Of course Kagi is pursuing AI. Why is that
| bad? It's a promising search technology.
|
| Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Kagi's vision involves
| organic growth and a pay-for-what-you-use users-are-the-
| customer Internet. They're giving us a chance to pay for both a
| browser and search. Something this community has been asking
| for.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Brave search works pretty well.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It boils down to: there used to be somewhat of a firewall
| between advertising and search divisions. Search's goal could
| be best results possible and advertising's goal could be most
| ads. The head of ads decided that wasn't good enough and said
| "all goals have to help ad goals" with the implicit suggestion
| that if a change to search was good for ads, but bad for users,
| then that was the path that was going to be taken.
| recursive wrote:
| Using an adblocker for a search engine establishes an
| adversarial relationship. Why should I have to do that? Why can
| I not just turn off ads? Of course, we both know the answer to
| that. Google makes less money then. But this same motivation is
| affecting everything they do. If Google had their way, they'd
| put ads in front of your eyeballs even though you don't want
| it. I'd rather use a search engine that doesn't start from an
| adversarial position.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > I used "management consultant" there as a pejorative.
|
| The road to death of capitalism will be paved by MBA degrees
| gnicholas wrote:
| > _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?
| bitvoid wrote:
| IIRC, they combined have about 51% voting shares
| gnicholas wrote:
| Ah, looks like this is correct, at least as of 2022:
|
| > _Even though such classes of shares were unusual in the
| tech industry, Brin and Page decided to copy the structure.
| In the case of Google (now Alphabet), A shares carry one
| vote, while B shares each carry 10 votes. Brin and Page
| between them own 51 percent of those B shares, giving them
| joint control of the company, even though they own less than
| 12 percent of its total shares._
|
| 1: https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/warren-buffett-google-
| serge...
| justinbaker84 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| According to this they own 86% of class B shares together:
| https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/011516/top-5-g...
| arromatic wrote:
| 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 .
| ppeetteerr wrote:
| What killed Google Search are the AI research papers that
| ultimately led to the rise of OpenAI
| kreeben wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yeah, it's a lot of what you said but if it were the only
| player in town, then you'd have to deal with the monopoly.
| With AI, I can pull up a 70-99% accurate answer to my
| question (for many questions) and avoid the mess of ads
| altogether.
|
| You can tell Alphabet is panicking because they started
| showing AI-generated answers to searches above the ads they
| serve.
| flakiness wrote:
| Prabhakar Raghavan is an author of "Introduction to Information
| Retrieval", the definitive textbook on search at that time. This
| fact metaphorically depicts how sad this story is.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Information-Retrieval-Ch...
| fudged71 wrote:
| I recently saved this book as it's been recommended by a few
| people lately. Interesting
| anothername12 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yeah he only co-authored 2 highly influential CS textbooks when
| he wasn't failing upward
| qintl55 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Yeah it's the pictures that really bother me, but you're not
| wrong. On the phone, I turn off "Discover".
| readyplayernull wrote:
| > 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.
| chasd00 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| wayne-li2 wrote:
| 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.
| scarfacedeb wrote:
| Yeah, the same for me. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for every
| query and it's often too US specific.
| sailfast wrote:
| Agreed - I can appreciate the sentiment and the history, but
| the ad hominem is not really necessary to prove the point and
| undermines the credibility of the post.
|
| I still use Google, but man has it become difficult to get to
| what I want.
| etempleton wrote:
| I agree, but all of the alternatives are no better. Bing and
| Duck Duck Go are okay sometimes, but truly terrible other
| times. Google is consistently worse than it once was, but
| still better than the competition.
|
| I know search is hard to do well, but if Google is truly
| floundering where is the startup that for it better and not
| just better for a very specific niche area, but truly better
| across the board?
| RoyalHenOil wrote:
| I like Kagi. It's not great for images or videos at this
| stage, but it is good for general search because you can
| personalize the rankings of the results. And they are
| introducing improvements all the time.
| juped wrote:
| Using a pejorative is not an "ad hominem".
| abtinf wrote:
| > There are ways to call out people for being bad at their job
|
| That is _not at all_ what the article is doing. The article is
| saying the person is doing a very good job doing bad things.
| __loam wrote:
| I think the tone is warranted given the scale of the problem. I
| don't think we should mollify complaints about products that
| literal billions of people depend on just because they're not
| nice.
| posix_monad wrote:
| LLMs and astro-turfing have ruined that approach. I honestly
| don't know where to get information from these days.
| devindotcom wrote:
| I disagree. ratfuck is a specific term, not just a general
| pejorative. and I think class traitor is appropriate here as
| well. but i get what you're saying. that's the result, pro and
| con, of the shift away from edited journalism to stuff like
| ed's newsletter.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I had to look this up -- I've never heard it used in Britain.
|
| > Ratfucking is an American slang term for behind the scenes
| (covert) political sabotage or dirty tricks, particularly
| pertaining to elections
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratfucking
| remarkEon wrote:
| Interesting. In the (US) military, we used this term to
| describe someone who breaks into the MRE stash and steals
| all the good stuff, leaving horrid creations like cheese
| and veggie omelette.
|
| "Private Johnson got caught ratfucking the MREs while
| everyone was doing PT" etc etc
| johncessna wrote:
| I've always used it as a variant of chicken fucker
| deskr wrote:
| Considering what these guys have done to google search, I think
| this is the absolute minimum set of words they deserve.
| deepakarora3 wrote:
| I have been using Google search for many years now and for the
| past few years have been wondering if the search has really
| gone bad or is it just me. I remember the days when searching
| for something used to bring up a few sponsored links separately
| and I could go page after page with different results on each
| page allowing me to access a wealth of information and
| extending my reach deep into the internet. Now, it is all
| sponsored links and the same ones page after page. It is so sad
| to see and the worse part is that I am not seeing any
| alternative. Bing is equally bad, DDG only marginally better. I
| hope there comes an alternative soon but I also realize coming
| into this space is certainly not easy.
| 3abiton wrote:
| I am dreading the day when reddit becomes full of hot posts. I
| don't know what filter will I use then. I guess HN? But even I
| don't think we'll be safe from the GPTs here either.
| yifanl wrote:
| 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)
| lazyeye wrote:
| https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/23/google-search-boss-raghavan-...
| bigjimmyk3 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Are there known examples of ex-McKinsey employees that are
| generally considered a force for good in general?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| gregw134 wrote:
| 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.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > where he argued against the other search leads that Google
| should use less machine-learning
|
| This better echoes my personal experience with the decline of
| Google search than TFA: it seems to be connected to the
| increasing use of ML in that the more of it Google put in, the
| worse the results I got were.
| potatolicious wrote:
| It's also a good lesson for the new AI cycle we're in now.
| Often inserting ML subsystems into your broader system just
| makes it go from "deterministically but fixably bad" to
| "mysteriously and unfixably bad".
| __loam wrote:
| This is why hallucinations will never be fixed in language
| models. That's just how they work.
| munk-a wrote:
| I think - I hope, rather - that technically minded people
| who are advocating for the use of ML understand the short
| comings and hallucinations... but we need to be frank about
| the fact that the business layer above us (with a few rare
| exceptions) absolutely does not understand the limitations
| of AI and views it as a magic box where they type in "Write
| me a story about a bunny" and get twelve paragraphs of text
| out. As someone working in a healthcare adjacent field I've
| seen the glint in executive's eyes when talking about AI
| and it can provide real benefits in data summarization and
| annotation assistance... but there are limits to what you
| should trust it with and if it's something big-i Important
| then you'll always want to have a human vetting step.
| fuzztester wrote:
| Same here with YouTube, assuming they use ML, which is
| likely.
|
| They routinely give me brain-dead suggestions such as to
| watch a video I just watched today or yesterday, among other
| absurdities.
| 998244353 wrote:
| For what it's worth, I do not remember a time when
| YouTube's suggestions or search results were good.
| Absurdities like that happened 10 and 15 years ago as well.
|
| These days my biggest gripe is that they put unrelated
| ragebait or clickbait videos in search results that I very
| clearly did not search for - often about American politics.
| layer8 wrote:
| This is happening to me to, but from the kind of videos
| it's suggested for I suspect that people actually do tend
| to rewatch those particular videos, hence the
| recommendation.
| gverrilla wrote:
| YT Shorts recommendations are a joke. I'm an atheist and
| very rarely watch something related to religion, and even
| so Shorts put me in 3 or 4 live prayers/scams (not sure)
| the last few months.
| epcoa wrote:
| Prayers for the unbelievers makes some sense.
| jokoon wrote:
| that's not something ML people would like to hear
| oblio wrote:
| Is ML the new SOAP? Looks like a silver bullet and 5 years
| later you're drowning in complexity for no discernible
| reason?
| __loam wrote:
| Don't forget about that expensive GPU infrastructure you
| invested in.
| jokoon wrote:
| and the power bill
|
| and how difficult it is to program those GPU to do ML
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> SOAP_
|
| Argh. My PTSD from writing ONVIF drivers just kicked in.
| eschneider wrote:
| Been there, Done that. Slides over a bottle of single
| malt.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Amit was definitely against ML, long before "AI" had become a
| buzzword.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| He wasn't the only one. I built a couple of systems there
| integrated into the accounts system and "no ML" was an
| explicit upfront design decision. It was never regretted and
| although I'm sure they put ML in it these days, last I heard
| as of a few years ago was that at the core were still pages
| and pages of hand written logic.
|
| I got nothing against ML in principle, but if the model
| doesn't do the right thing then you can just end up stuck.
| Also, it often burns a lot of resources to learn something
| that was obvious to human domain experts anyway. Plus the
| understandability issues.
| zem wrote:
| i worked on ranking during singhal's tenure, and it was
| definitely refreshing to see a "no black box ML ranking"
| stance.
| banish-m4 wrote:
| Thanks for writing this insightful piece.
|
| The pathologies of big companies that fail to break themselves
| up into smaller non-siloed entities like Virgin Group does.
| Maintaining the successful growing startup ways and fighting
| against politics, bureaucracy, fiefdoms, and burgeoning
| codebases is difficult but is a better way than chasing short-
| term profits, massive codebases, institutional inertia, dealing
| with corporate bullshit that gets in the way of the customer
| experience and pushes out solid technical ICs and leaders.
|
| I'm surprised there aren't more people on here who decide
| "F-it, MAANG megacorps are too risky and backwards not
| representative of their roots" and form worker-owned co-ops to
| do what MAANGs are doing, only better, and with long-term
| business sustainability, long tenure, employee perks like the
| startup days, and positive civil culture as their central
| mission.
| barfbagginus wrote:
| I formed a worker co-op - but it's just me! And I do CAD
| reverse engineering, nothing really life-giving.
|
| I would love to join a co-op producing real human survival
| values in an open source way. Where would you suggest that I
| look for leads on that kind of organization?
| jokoon wrote:
| simplicity is always the recipe for success, unfortunately,
| most engineers are drawn to complexity like moth to fire
|
| if they were unable to do some AB testing between a ML search
| and a non-ML search, they deserve their failure 100%
|
| there are not enough engineers blowing the whistle against ML
| influx wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Feels like the author has some personal vendatta against
| Prabhakar.
|
| We have to remember Google is a corporation beholden to
| Shareholders who demand growth, otherwise they sell their stock
| and buy the next thing that will give them Growth (See Tesla).
|
| The truth is that Google's golden egg laying Goose - Ads isn't
| laying significantly more eggs every quarter. Similar to Apple's
| egg laying Goose - iPhone.
|
| Only so much the world's largest corporations can grow when human
| population itself is plateauing.
|
| The easiest way is to squeeze more from the users. If not for
| Prabhakar, it would be someone else.
|
| Corporations are hive-mind revenue optimizing entities.
|
| Even if Google fired Prabhakar and Sundar Pichai, it doesn't
| magically fix their current culture.
|
| This does leave the risk that someone else will take their lunch
| if they get too complacent.
|
| Seeing how crappy Bing UX is, I think Google is fine for time
| being.
|
| Their biggest threat is someone like perplexity or OpenAI making
| a radically better and accurate search engine that gives users
| exactly what they want.
| temporarely wrote:
| 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]
| pphysch wrote:
| Countdown to when Google releases a Kagi competitor "Premium
| Search" that bundles ad-free, configurable Search with their SOTA
| Gemini model...
| deskr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Reminds me of when the mostly loved Google Inbox was killed
| because people spent less time in gmail
| next_xibalba wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I usually add before:2019 to google search queries to remove a
| lot of LLM generated articles.
| eatsyourtacos wrote:
| 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
| tinyhouse wrote:
| 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.
| labrador wrote:
| I used to care but don't anymore. I use AI for my questions.
| tired_and_awake wrote:
| I'm dying here, from the article;
|
| > What about Raghavan's career made this feel right? How has
| nobody connected these dots before and said something? Am I
| insane?
|
| Yeah spend any amount of time in tech and you will learn this
| feeling well. There should be some long German word that
| describes it.
|
| How many acquaintances do I know that have sold their useless
| startups for 10s of millions. Others that are promoted well past
| the Peter Principal into positions that have them leading
| thousands - and lacking the basic skills or empathy needed to
| understand what it is their orgs do.
|
| This can either make you bitter and burn out... Or you can let it
| go. The universe doesn't owe us fairness. Ask the seal being
| played with by an Orca before being torn to shreds how it feels
| about fairness.
|
| Go enjoy life friends. Luck dominates so much of what is
| perceived as success. There are more important things to worry
| about.
| rhelz wrote:
| 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.
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