It gets better:&gt; a management consultant wearing an engineer costume&gt; his expertise lies primarily in “failing up,” ascending through the ranks of technology on the momentum from the explosions he caused

&gt; a computer scientist class traitor that sided with the management consultancy sectWell if that ain&#x27;t the purdiest turn of phrase

There are plenty of links in the article to &quot;emails released as part of the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google&quot;. I didn&#x27;t read any of it as saying he was involved in those conversations, they&#x27;re just conversations that have been made public.

Thanks for responding. That&#x27;ll teach me to skim-read while I&#x27;m on a meeting so can&#x27;t give it my full attention.

&gt; It&#x27;s a little confusing because some of them are part of one big, fat thread that you have to read from the bottom upIt seems no-one, not even Google, can escape Outlook-style email concatenation.

I am directly citing emails revealed in discovery as part of the Department of Justice&#x27;s antitrust suit against Google. They&#x27;re all linked in there too! And you can even see who was CC&#x27;d. It&#x27;s a little confusing because some of them are part of one big, fat thread that you have to read from the bottom up.

The article has a bunch of links like this one: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;usdoj-media&#x2F;atr&#x2F;media&#x2F;1322631&#x2F;dl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;usdoj-media&#x2F;atr&#x2F;media&#x2F;1322631&#x2F;dl</a>If you follow them you&#x27;ll get copies of email threads related to a suit against Google where the non-public information was revealed.

It&#x27;s based on emails published as evidence in a trial:* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;usdoj-media&#x2F;atr&#x2F;media&#x2F;1322631&#x2F;dl?inline=" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;usdoj-media&#x2F;atr&#x2F;media&#x2F;1322631&#x2F;dl?inl...</a>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;d9&#x2F;2023-11&#x2F;417557.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;d9&#x2F;2023-11&#x2F;417557.pdf</a>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;d9&#x2F;2023-11&#x2F;417581.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;d9&#x2F;2023-11&#x2F;417581.pdf</a>

What&#x27;s the source for all of this? It includes reportage of a bunch of conversations where there&#x27;s no way this guy was present.

I have the same opinion but Google does downrank actual personal site&#x2F;blogs even if it&#x27;s useful or good and serves you garbage.

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.

Those people did everything according to Google&#x27;s guidelines then Google changed everything and screwed them over. That&#x27;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&#x27; sake.&gt; gambled with their livelihoodGoogle 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 &quot;Go use a competitor&quot; 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&#x27;s what using an &#x27;alternative&#x27; 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.

&gt; People have been robbed of their livelihoodsThat&#x27;s absurd. People gambled with their livelihood, some got rich, and most lost.

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.

I feel like at least on Reddit results you&#x27;ll get something that may be helpful. The Quora results have NEVER resulted in something useful for me.

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 &gt; Either it&#x27;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 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;detailed.com&#x2F;google-control&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;detailed.com&#x2F;google-control&#x2F;</a> and non existent personal sites . But i am still pessimistic about new search engines like bing has backing of a behemoth microsoft yet can&#x27;t copy simple features from google.

&gt;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&#x27;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&#x27;t &quot;click&quot; - the management just rides the gravy train until it lasts.I&#x27;ve been for years wondering what will displace Google - I was sure that such paradigm shift would happen as always, I just couldn&#x27;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.

Wow, it had been years since I read a Barry Schwartz post, a SEO authority since back in the day, I didn&#x27;t realize his forum had turned so nasty.Funny you mention &#x27;No content creator thinks to themselves, “let me go write my next article on Reddit”&#x27;. Schwartz and many other SERP&#x2F;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&#x2F;month) or ad-free paid search (Kagi) are eating away at Google&#x27;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&#x2F;marketing deals.

So everyone should start making html only site like danluu  or pre -2000 ?

I also follow SERoundtable (I have worked as SEO&#x2F;digital marketer&#x2F;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&#x2F;non-spammy aggregator sites) get wholesale demoted&#x2F;deranked&#x2F;deindexed.In ~2016 Google started shifting towards optimizing for financial objectives more aggressively than user experience. Timing updates to coincide with beginning&#x2F;end of fiscal quarters, blending ads, features solely created to drive incremental searches (People Also Ask&#x2F;Related Searches), various misaligned defaults within GAds interface, branded search extortion, stance against header bidding, etc.. Essentially when they stopped promoting the &quot;Don&#x27;t be evil.&quot; 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&#x2F;tracking&#x2F;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&#x27;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 &gt;50% of product searches start directly on Amazon (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;searchengineland.com&#x2F;50-of-product-searches-start-on-amazon-424451" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;searchengineland.com&#x2F;50-of-product-searches-start-on...</a>), Google can&#x27;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&#x27;s last relatively safe bastions of profit-- but eventually advertisers in these spaces have to reach a level of sophistication to realize they&#x27;re giving too much of their margin to Google, leading to push-back. Highly fragmented, lower margin spaces like restaurants (or other &quot;near me&quot; 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&#x2F;location&#x2F;menus&#x2F;reviews.

Spammers are smart enough to post their spam on reddit too. Then upvote it with bots.

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.

The quora ranking has to be one of the most morally bankrupt deals in modern history.

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&#x2F;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]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40067605">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40067605</a>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seroundtable.com&#x2F;category&#x2F;google-updates" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seroundtable.com&#x2F;category&#x2F;google-updates</a>

Sometimes I joke it was me - ex. my first year was the first year with no holiday gift. I&#x27;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&#x2F;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&#x27;re forced to recognize this very quickly.

As a Xoogler from 2007-2013 it saddens me to hear how it&#x27;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.

&gt; relative to those old dunderheads babbling their opinions about users.Why did I read this in Connie Sacks&#x27; voice talking to George Smiley (The Alec Guinness one)?I&#x27;m sure they&#x27;ll get Karla (Raghavan), in the end. It&#x27;s his fanaticism that will do him in.

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 &quot;Code Yellow&quot; was named after a lead&#x27;s tanktop. But it&#x27;s very much what you&#x27;d think, there&#x27;s a &quot;Code Red&quot; and &quot;Code Yellow&quot; and Code Red is DEFCON 1, not Code Yellow. Shorthand for signalling &quot;this is your manager^3 saying its okay to work on this, in case your manager^1 gets in the way&quot;The thing I&#x27;d like to draw your attention as a Xoogler, 2016 to 2023, is this bit:&gt; 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&#x27;s a huge company, there&#x27;s pockets of good and bad.But by far and large, unless you&#x27;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, &#x27;standard business&#x27; decision-making has infected every corner. Scaling meant importing a lot of management from other companies, and not great ones. And the self-induced &quot;crisis&quot; of not growing revenue 20% every year has left them empowered relative to those old dunderheads babbling their opinions about users.There&#x27;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 &#x2F; 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&#x27;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&#x27;re enabling bad stuff. Ex. &quot;no one person is responsible for failure&#x2F;success of their product&quot; enables &quot;for some reason Yahoo&#x27;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.&quot;I&#x27;m still sad about the launches I participated in that were straight up lies when demo&#x27;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&#x27;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.

Friend! Get thee to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ublockorigin.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ublockorigin.com&#x2F;</a> ! You can thank me later!

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.

Thinking about search ads over time, I had forgotten how ads were clearly marked in a blue box way back when.

Speaking of AI ruining Google search,<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsky.app&#x2F;profile&#x2F;dahosek.bsky.social&#x2F;post&#x2F;3kqm25jwsf22l" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsky.app&#x2F;profile&#x2F;dahosek.bsky.social&#x2F;post&#x2F;3kqm25jwsf...</a>

google search was horribly unusable for me yesterday in English from California.. it was obviously changing my search terms and then delivering &quot;popular&quot; 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

&gt; At certain company sizes, the direct output of entire divisions ceases to be visible to leadership.
&gt; What they receive instead are reports that filter up through management.Yeah but it doesn&#x27;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 &#x27;leaders are thinking about things on a strategic level&#x27;.And don&#x27;t get me started on promotion. If I find&#x2F;do something that improves the teams performance by 10x, &quot;that is just doing my job, please don&#x27;t bring up stuff like that to management.&quot; &quot;you need to have impact across teams&quot;. So every team is trying to make every other team take on their &#x27;product&#x27; and no one wants to take on other teams product because even if it improves their quality &#x2F; productivity, they don&#x27;t get anything for it.

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&#x27;re doing so on the basis of what they&#x27;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

Who is going to pay you more for the puff piece journamalism than a multi-billionaire conman?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;prospect.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;press-release-journamalism&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;prospect.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;press-release-journamalism&#x2F;</a>

All the adulation and covers devoted to Sam Bankman-Fried come to mind.

They&#x27;re not fluff pieces. They&#x27;re ads. Bought and paid for.

&gt; People failing with golden parachutes, and others failing upwards into even more lucrative roles. I think that&#x27;s the thing that is eating away at the core of our societyAnd it&#x27;s not just &quot;people&quot; in general. It&#x27;s certain people: It&#x27;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 &quot;manager experience&quot; 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&#x27;ll call &quot;Director,&quot; 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&#x27;s demotivating as hell, and eats away at the idea that the world is just, fair, egalitarian. It&#x27;s certainly corrosive to society.

&gt; 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&#x27;t.)Your parenthesized logic is fallacious. No one is saying there&#x27;s no filter of who gets to make 7 figures. What people are saying is that merit isn&#x27;t the filter.&gt; It&#x27;s not as if these folks are utterly incompetent in their roles, but in fact they optimize for things you think don&#x27;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?&gt; To wit, sitting on a board is often &quot;free money&quot; 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&#x27;s a feature when it&#x27;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.

I don&#x27;t think you refuted the underlying point so much as gave cause to it. The idea isn&#x27;t that simply stupid people rise to the top, it&#x27;s that people who are capable of gaming a system without providing for or attending to the system they&#x27;re deftly traversing are floated by their EQ&#x2F;credentials&#x2F;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&#x27;s a very real, very human thing.I&#x27;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&#x27;re totally found out to move on to somewhere else with a yet better title). I&#x27;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 &quot;strength&quot; 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.

Reminds me of the Bruce Willis&#x2F;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.

&gt; To wit, sitting on a board is often &quot;free money&quot; and those positions are purely obtained by networking.The people I know who&#x27;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.

&gt; 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&#x27;t.) It&#x27;s not as if these folks are utterly incompetent in their roles, but in fact they optimize for things you think don&#x27;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 &quot;free money&quot; 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.

Wired had a period where they were absolutely excellent, under Chris Anderson as their chief editor. When he left it was like a switch was thrown; wired almost immediately began to resemble GQ or other &quot;general interest&quot; magazines, with the only differentiating factor being asking the interviewee what apps they have on their iPhone

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&#x27;s the thing that is eating away at the core of our society: basic contracts like &quot;fail and you won&#x27;t get rewarded&quot; or &quot;succeed and you&#x27;ll get rewarded&quot; 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&#x27;t fucking matter.Edit: WIRED is the worst about these useless tech fluff pieces. It&#x27;s like they make insane money from just fauning all over whatever tech CEO is the hottest right.

100 billion (round figured) isn&#x27;t a lot when you are going to create a new large company or invent fusion or fix climate .

they have much more money than they really need for everyday happiness.

They have achieved Nirvana. And they have enough dough to last several lifetimes.

Concern why?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;es.finance.yahoo.com&#x2F;quote&#x2F;GOOG&#x2F;?guccounter=1&amp;guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&amp;guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAAfpbOfJCpq9ep6hvgFLXSihACCxBXPiYEQjOsUmh5iMQu1iI8RKIFWeLg3DCrtBY4cAjIn3fat4kEfBrtU61pBkvNTH5JoWjQjiTztdG21-yHnQr5tDlRYVnUd_nLPZnsZ2lxp7FNl6kt-uuZgElg9jTyrlJT9IYGUpfiGoQjGL" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;es.finance.yahoo.com&#x2F;quote&#x2F;GOOG&#x2F;?guccounter=1&amp;guce_r...</a>

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&#x2F;twitter of larry&#x2F;brin ? If you have can you try emailing them . Or is it public ? Gonna try emailing them

Pichai must be Grima Wormtongue tier bamboozler

speculation: they care, they know the people involved, and think highly of them.Larry &amp; 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 &quot;failing up&quot; are, in some cases, the Lebron James&#x27;s of bamboozlement.It&#x27;s quite strange to see very capable people fall for such types, but it happens, I&#x27;ve seen it - and everyone around saw it except the very capable person.

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.

Purely speculation of course, but based on what they&#x27;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&#x27;re now more interested in engaging in (self-driving, longevity, etc.)The cynical assumption would be that they&#x27;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&#x27;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.

The web is over now. Google first, AI later killed any incentive to create content for the open web

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 &quot;Jobs returning to Apple&quot; miracle. As they say, &quot;you can&#x27;t get there from here&quot;. There&#x27;s no easy path for Google back from the short term profit-driven corner they&#x27;ve painted all of us into.

I am unable to understand your comment . Can you please explain a little bit more ?

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.

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.”<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;google-advertising-and-search-engine-bias&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;google-advertising-and-search-e...</a>

I can imagine this happening in many places: 1) Idealist phase. 2) Hype phase. 3) Novelty wears off = Leave. 4) Bean counter phase. 5) ???

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.

What are they whispering ? more profit or please rank my site or i will sue you .

Page is only 50 and doesn&#x27;t have any health issues that I know aside from his vocal cord thing 10 years ago

You get older, you lose the willpower and energy to fight the machineThey 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 dayDo I, Larry Page, really want to deal with all of that with my failing health and depleting energy?

They don&#x27;t care about Alphabet&#x2F;Google at all. They&#x27;ve fully moved on.Even if Alphabet lost all its market value tomorrow, they&#x27;ve already cashed out enough of their stock to have thousands of lifetimes of money.

I assume their wealth is not particularly tied to Google stock. Eggs, baskets etc.

Maybe they know that the AI is going to destroy Google anyway, same as any other search engine, so why bother.

Question : Why larry and brin not caring about it ? They built one of world&#x27;s best and biggest company and it&#x27;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.

I&#x27;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.

I don&#x27;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*.

Brutal? Yeah. But it&#x27;s a great read.

Wow. This man seems to have a personal grudge against Raghavan.  I knew people hate Pichai, but this brutal.

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.

It would be nice to have some generic&#x2F;universally accepted syntax for fuzzy&#x2F;non-fuzzy(?) search behavior.e.g. something like &quot;exact match for this string&quot; and ~(similar or fuzzy match for this string)

I switched to using DuckDuckGo primarily, and it&#x27;s now fuzzy by default. It returns lots of results that doesn&#x27;t contain more than the most generic word in my query, and I always get this one hit for a completely unrelated site just because it has the name of my town in the headline.Sure you can force it by using &quot;foobar&quot; but yeah, searching the web isn&#x27;t what it used to be.

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.

I&#x27;m so sick of search systems ignoring or changing my search string. LinkedIn is especially bad for this. If I search for &quot;OpenGL&quot;, many of the results don&#x27;t contain the one word I searched for. Many of the results are &quot;promoted&quot; 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.

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 &quot;villian&quot; 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&#x27;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 &quot;juvenile&quot; writer Mark Twain.

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&#x27;s better for only a few, including himself, just for profits.

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.

&quot;Class traitor&quot; isn&#x27;t a juvenile insult. It has a fairly well-defined meaning and describes a set of problematic behaviors: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Class_traitor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Class_traitor</a>Are you saying that it&#x27;s an incorrect description, or are you just generally against accusing people of things?

Agreed. I struggled to keep going after &quot;computer scientist class traitor&quot;. A very juvenile take that reflects poorly on the author, IMO.

&gt; 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&#x27;t outsiders blame the entire company? That&#x27;s our interface, and also how we can hold the company accountable for its collective behavior.It&#x27;s also a defense against scapegoating: it wasn&#x27;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&#x2F;or whistleblow -- was totally powerless. The company as an entity is responsible, and a lot of individuals were key or complicit.

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.

&gt; ...and gives us a name to actually blame.I&#x27;m not sure that scapegoating makes the characterization of the article any better.&gt; atleast this guy has given us good information and context to understand Googles decline.The style of the article gives good reason to think that the context &amp; information is selectively provided.&gt; And of course, it&#x27;s more entertaining when people are called out.Yup.

I was strongly motivated to upvote and share this article. I probably upvote and share 1&#x2F;500 articles I read on this website. So I disagree, I think his tone helps convey how the bulk of people feel about Google&#x27;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&#x27;s more entertaining when people are called out.

And your criticism of him is what? Encourage more sensationalism? Because there&#x27;s so much evidence of that being such good and healthy way for journalism&#x2F;news to operate?

I think that you unintentionally hit the core of why things are turning into crap.

this is such a tiresome criticism. &quot;this would be better if it were more boring&quot; yeah okay and 4 people would read it and 2 of them would fall asleep during

Aside from the annoying pop-up, I didn&#x27;t actually notice the other calls to subscribe.It&#x27;s a bit of an unfortunate situation for the author, if any reasonable number of people are like me. If I didn&#x27;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&#x27;s standpoint is that there&#x27;s just one call to subscribe, at the very end, the idea being that if you can&#x27;t make it to the end of the article, you probably aren&#x27;t going to subscribe anyway.And yet so many sites still do the modal pop-up that interrupts you while you&#x27;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?

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 &quot;blogs&quot; put in front you as if they wanted you to avoid reading the material. What is wrong with these people?

I agree and it&#x27;s especially frustrating because it&#x27;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.

I thought it was written very well, and was engaging.  I could easily imagine it being dry and boring, otherwise, something that wouldn&#x27;t hold my attention long enough to read through it to the end.

That&#x27;s the first question that came to mind while reading the article. Many of the possible answers that came to mind did nothing to improve my perception of the article.

The problem there is that nobody wrote that article, someone did write this one. You should ask yourself why that is.

Yes, I felt that the style of the writing lead me to doubt whether I was reading the full story (and indeed, the way Prabhakar&#x27;s work at IBM is minimized reinforced that impression).

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.

I&#x27;m not sure why people buy into the idea of this being down to an underling and not the CEO. Generally, the way this type of management structure works, it all heavily depends on the direction and incentives in place from the top down. And obviously it is not an underling that decides to replace someone with himself.Now, let&#x27;s look at how the corporate investors that hired that CEO operate.

&gt;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.

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).

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 &quot;poof&quot; - then of course they don&#x27;t want it.

There is an article called &quot;The man that killed X&quot; for every X.

Why do you think they bought Android and built Chrome? :)

Wow, weird that $300B+ in revenue is just showing up in Google&#x27;s bank account every year even without an active search engine.

I don&#x27;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&#x27;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.

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 ?

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 ?

What is definition of dead? 15 years later they have huge majority of traffic share and lots of revenue.

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&#x2F;01&#x2F;2015, and 182K on 01&#x2F;01&#x2F;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: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.macrotrends.net&#x2F;stocks&#x2F;charts&#x2F;GOOG&#x2F;alphabet&#x2F;number-of-employees" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.macrotrends.net&#x2F;stocks&#x2F;charts&#x2F;GOOG&#x2F;alphabet&#x2F;numb...</a>

&gt; 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&#x27;re doing &quot;layoffs&quot; with 180k+ in 2024. I don&#x27;t think the layoffs mean much.

ChuckMcM, I just wanted to say, I really appreciate the long view you bring to HN discussions. When you&#x27;ve been in tech for a few decades you start to see predictable patterns. History may not repeat, but it often rhymes.

I&#x27;m really glad the article came out though, it fills in some gaps that I was fairly confident about but didn&#x27;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 &#x27;fix&#x27; search using a mix of curation and ranking.When I left, this problem of CPC&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;ve written here and elsewhere about it, and watched from the outside post 2010 and when people were saying &quot;Google is going to steam roll everyone&quot; I was saying, &quot;I don&#x27;t think so, I think unless they change they are dead already.&quot; 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 &quot;Will they pull their head out in time to recover?&quot; 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] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;spreadsheets&#x2F;d&#x2F;18_y-Zyhx-5a1_kcW-x7pQertMZJZmwci2oMi_omSr8A&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;spreadsheets&#x2F;d&#x2F;18_y-Zyhx-5a1_kcW-x7p...</a>[2] Silicon Graphics -- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sfchronicle.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;article&#x2F;peninsula-high-tech-firm-gets-ok-to-build-on-3041497.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sfchronicle.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;article&#x2F;peninsula-high-tech...</a>

How many companies have management consultants taken down? It&#x27;s quite amazing how bad they are at anything. Peter Thiel&#x27;s hatred for consultants is really legit.

I enjoy reading this chap&#x27;s stuff. It&#x27;s not the way that I would write, but he&#x27;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&#x27;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).

Exactly.How much of (online) advertising is legit? Does any one know?What would a &quot;healthy&quot; ad ecosystem look like? What should the the FTC (and advertisers) be working towards?Eliminate any potential conflicts of interest? Bust up vertical integration (eg search &amp; ads must remain separate companies)? Independent verification, as best able (eg like Nielsen does for ratings)?Or maybe we determine (digital) ads based biz models are irredeemable, and we figure something else out.

The 2010-2013 timeline was also when the problem of ad fraud exploded. Google even acquired a company (or multiple, if I recon correctly: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ft.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;352c7d8e-9acc-11e3-946b-00144feab7de" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ft.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;352c7d8e-9acc-11e3-946b-00144feab...</a> ). You had these companies popping up left and right that were snooping on Google and the emerging programmatic advertising environment to see if the websites and the traffic delivered were legit, and there were some scary numbers flying around.The whole problem kind of got swept under the rug with most advertising ecosystems implementing a checkbox solution for clean traffic, and the web turned mobile user first.My impression is that ad fraud never disappeared - it just got sanitized and rolled in with the other parts of the ad stack.

Before 2019, the year most people who had issues with Google Search gave as the last one it was decent was 2012, so that tracks.

Phenomenal article, very entertaining and aligns with my experience as a prominent search &quot;outsider&quot; (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&#x27;s life work on a faceless mega tech corporation.It was not soon after when Google eliminated &quot;Don&#x27;t Be Evil&quot; from the mission statement. At least they were somewhat self aware, I suppose.

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.

The MAX was exactly what their customers wanted.

Welch and Reagan teamed up to destroy the middle class.

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.

This sounds an awful lot like the Boeing story, even including the “[engineering] class traitor” running the failing division.

This was a good one: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wheresyoured.at&#x2F;the-rot-economy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wheresyoured.at&#x2F;the-rot-economy&#x2F;</a>

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&#x27;t many search results about this guy, let alone anything negative.

You explained DDG really well.DDG has so much potential to innovate with a sufficiently large user base and popularity .

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&#x27;s not entirely Google&#x27;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.

I try. I swear to god I try. Then the DDG search results come up, and they&#x27;re just dumb. It&#x27;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&#x27;re looking for. It can sort of find something related to it, but not really relevant. But look, it&#x27;s actually a god doing it. Woohoo.Of course, there is no dog, sadly. It&#x27;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&#x27;m dumb though. I know Google won&#x27;t find what I want. This is 2024&#x27;s Google, not 2015&#x27;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.

I switched over to DDG sometime in 2017 or 2018, haven&#x27;t used Google Search since.

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.

Since killing != killed, your comment already shows that the title is misleading.

That&#x27;s what the article is arguing though. That a certain individual is &#x27;killing&#x27; (not killed yet) Google Search. A different title would be misleading.

Linkbait is about using tricks to grab attention rather than providing neutral information. Hyperbole is only one way to do that.In this case &quot;The man who&quot; is a linkbait trope and &quot;killed&quot; is a sensational attention-grabby word. Composing them into &quot;the man who killed&quot; is linkbait.

&quot;Linkbait&quot; implies it&#x27;s hyperbole, but I would argue that the headline is a perfect description of the argument being made here.

I agree - and flagged it as a result. It is clearly a hit piece and has promptly even made it to Prabhakar&#x27;s wikipedia page: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Prabhakar_Raghavan" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Prabhakar_Raghavan</a>

&quot;Prabhakar Raghavan is a bad man&quot; :)

The number of times his name is repetitively mentioned in the article makes me read it in the voice of Stewart Lee.

&quot;Prabhakar Raghavan is killing Google&quot;&quot;Google&#x27;s Death from Within: Prabhakar Raghavan&quot;&quot;Blame Prabhakar Raghavan for Google&#x27;s Crappy Search&quot;&quot;Google Sucks. Because of Prabhakar Raghavan&quot;&quot;Prabhakar Raghavan is the man killing Google Search.&quot;&quot;Yahoo Search Killer Prabhakar Raghavan Turns Death Ray on Google&quot;&quot;Prabhakar Raghavan and the no good very bad Google search.&quot;

&quot;Google ad revenue stalled, so they made SERPs worse on purpose&quot;

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.

I didn&#x27;t read it, I skimmed it. In this context, &quot;read&quot; means &quot;read it enough to form my own view of the story&quot;; &quot;skim&quot; means &quot;read it enough for moderation purposes&quot;, such as title editing.Moderation relies on the fact that those two are not the same. It is impossible to read all the articles; it is possible to skim enough of them to make moderation feasible.(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, but I don&#x27;t like the personal attack aspect, which shows up as a mob dynamic in the comments here.)

&gt; I&#x27;m not taking a position for or against the article; I haven&#x27;t read it.If you haven&#x27;t read it, why are you in a position to suggest whether the title is accurate to the article&#x27;s contents or not?

about time to program websites to serve JWZ balls when HN tries these tricks to confuse its users IMHO

those who can, write. those who cannot, change the meaning of titles.

Anybody have a better title? &#x27;Better&#x27; here means (1) less baity; (2) more accurate and neutral; and (3) preferably a representative phrase from the article itself.&quot;The man who killed Google Search&quot; is too baity. See the &#x27;unless&#x27; in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>: &quot;Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait&quot;Edit (since there are objections): I&#x27;m not taking a position for or against the article; I haven&#x27;t read it. This is just bog-standard HN moderation regarding titles. I skimmed the article looking for a representative phrase and couldn&#x27;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&#x27;s no consensus on this I&#x27;m just going to reify that fact via the trailing-question-mark trick and call it a day.

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.

Kagi seems to have their heads up their asses though. 
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40011314">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40011314</a>

I just recently switched to Kagi. It&#x27;s worth paying a few bucks to get decent results.

I&#x27;ve literally made the jump last week and switched all my defaults over to bing, after Google couldn&#x27;t find the simplest query I had about a video game that Bing found in first result. I&#x27;m just so done with google.

For what it&#x27;s worth, I have the opposite issue - when I can&#x27;t find what I&#x27;m looking for on more privacy focused search engines, I go to google because 99 times out of 100 it gives me what I&#x27;m looking for in the easiest&#x2F;quickest way.

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.

I would like to report that this emotion and experience completely disappeared after I ported my business workstation over to Ubuntu budgie. Not only does my computer crash a whopping 80% less, but it also uses 30% less memory on average.The main challenge was that I have to run my CAD software in a Windows VM. Ironically though the solution is more stable than running the CAD software on bare metal!I can definitively say that being free of Microsoft anxiety is very sweet, and worth far more than any effort I had to spend to do the porting. It has radically improved my computing quality of life.

I&#x27;m like this with Microsoft products. Anytime I need to buy one, I&#x27;m so worried I&#x27;m going to buy the wrong one. Once I have it, I&#x27;m worried its attached to the wrong account. Once I run it, I&#x27;m worried it wont start and I&#x27;ll need to install it through some weird microsoft store. Then when its working, I&#x27;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&#x27;ve been spared their punishments.

This is my experience too, I&#x27;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&#x27;m better off asking GPT those days.

Then why use it? I switched to DuckDuckGo years ago and it&#x27;s fine.

Start learning how to accurately prompt ai&#x27;s, and have valid and constructive conversations with them. This replaces 80% of the need for search, and gives you a number of valuable things search could never provide including valuable and constructive critiques and analysis. If you think that you can&#x27;t do this with llms because they are just parrots that means you have not read the latest papers on prompting and meet update your beliefs on the capabilities of llms like gpt4. These things do effective critical reasoning, with increasingly low rates of hallucination.To reduce the anxiety of search, use AI enhanced search to filter through the dross and find both meaningful search terms and results.After I did this my search anxiety reduced back to the level it was around 2012-2014, when Google had an effective search product. The quality of life improvement on search alone has been profound. But when you add in the fact that gpt4 can also help with communications issues, conflict resolution, and understanding my own complex and sometimes baffling emotions, the quality of life increase has been far greater than anything Google search ever gave me.Please consider upskilling with llm assisted search and analysis skills.

I feel there&#x27;s a place for a search engine that doesn&#x27;t give an f about currency &#x2F; recent results.Although sometimes useful, I find my my search results contaminated by popular, recent content.And it must cost Google a lot to continuously scrape the web.

Everytime I need to make a search on Google, I start to feel anxious, already convinced I&#x27;m not going to find anything useful about the problem I&#x27;m trying to solve. This often means I already tried everything else. It&#x27;s a sad situation.a product shouldn&#x27;t make you feel anxious.

As somebody who uses &quot;weird syntaxes&quot; 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.

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.

Indeed, AI is immensely useful! I use it every day too.However, it&#x27;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&#x27;ll be much more likely to use them for those things.

@drowsspaI don&#x27;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, &quot;why did this build fail?&quot;After pasting my last 3 workouts, &quot;I am wondering if I am not putting enough muscle on my body &#x2F; torso. 
Is this the case? if so, suggest me an exercise that utilizes body weight, dumbbells, or weighted exercise ball&quot;It suggested dumbbell pull over, so I asked &quot;What weight should I start with for the dumbbell pull over?&quot;&quot;say I want to go to the club and seem like I know what I am doing, how many dances should I know?&quot;&quot;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&quot;&quot;I made a notebook for non data scientists to follow and use, so I want to add lots of comments and mark down documentation.&quot; (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.

honestly, 99% of the time I don&#x27;t need search. I want AI. I don&#x27;t want to have to use a weird syntax to &#x27;talk to a search engine&#x27;. sometimes I don&#x27;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.

Another upvote for Kagi. I&#x27;ve been using it for a few months and have been happy with the experience. They do have some AI features&#x2F;interests, but I&#x27;m optimistic that the products they develop will serve me&#x2F;users. So far, so good.

Yes, and it&#x27;s possible to turn off the AI &#x2F; automated summary features if you don&#x27;t like them as well.

the quality isn&#x27;t great. They also have my money though because who else is there?

Kagi is still a good search engine though. Hopefully they continue to improve that part too, even if they do AI stuff.

It&#x27;s not just you, but perhaps there aren&#x27;t enough of us to make this commercially viable?

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.

Here&#x27;s my requirement: if I&#x27;m using a VPN, don&#x27;t constantly ask me to do CAPTCHA.

That is exactly what Kagi does. Kagi Small Web [1] was initiated to surface small personal websites in search engines again.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.kagi.com&#x2F;small-web" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.kagi.com&#x2F;small-web</a>

I just want a search engine that prioritizes small sites againI 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 productHalf my searches have site:reddit.com appended to them

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

Kagi is sure interested in the role of AI in searching, but the fact is that their product works great, so why the negativity?

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.

It&#x27;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&#x27;t &quot;Answer my question.&quot; I enjoy doing my own original research, thanks.I&#x27;m entirely willing - wanting even - to pay for it.Currently Kagi has my $, but I&#x27;m saddened and frustrated that they&#x27;re not even focused on Search, they&#x27;re focused on AI[1] and t-shirts.Amazingly, in 2024, there is still a market opportunity for a good search engine.It can&#x27;t really just be me, can it?[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?query=%22kagi%22+%22ai%22" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?query=%22kagi%22+%22ai%22</a>

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 &quot;Code Yellow&quot; results in 2019, and what happened when the resulting update reversed optimizations that had cut down on SEO spam.

Per the article, they purposefully rolled back suppression of spammy results:&gt; 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.

It boils down to: there used to be somewhat of a firewall between advertising and search divisions. Search&#x27;s goal could be best results possible and advertising&#x27;s goal could be most ads. The head of ads decided that wasn&#x27;t good enough and said &quot;all goals have to help ad goals&quot; 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.

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&#x27;d put ads in front of your eyeballs even though you don&#x27;t want it.  I&#x27;d rather use a search engine that doesn&#x27;t start from an adversarial position.

While entertaining it doesn&#x27;t actually say anything about what the villain guy actually did, am I crazy? There&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s the opposite, this doesn&#x27;t seem right to me. Can it not just be that spammers and SEO freaks got more sophisticated and the problem got more challenging?

google is terrible lately - I can&#x27;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.

&gt; I used “management consultant” there as a pejorative.The road to death of capitalism will be paved by MBA degrees

Ah, looks like this is correct, at least as of 2022:&gt; 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: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inc.com&#x2F;minda-zetlin&#x2F;warren-buffett-google-sergey-brin-larry-page-ipo-public-shares.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inc.com&#x2F;minda-zetlin&#x2F;warren-buffett-google-serge...</a>

IIRC, they combined have about 51% voting shares

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.

According to this they own 86% of class B shares together: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.investopedia.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;markets&#x2F;011516&#x2F;top-5-google-shareholders-goog.asp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.investopedia.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;markets&#x2F;011516&#x2F;top-5-g...</a>

&gt; 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 &quot;controlling shareholders&quot; in a different way?

Ben Gomes&#x27; Google and Microsoft (even now) are different beasts in terms of internal politics and culture[0]. Successful Googlers need not be successful at Microsoft.[0] To understand that, recall Vic Gundothra was an Microsoft export to Google. That&#x27;s the kind of people that thrive in Microsoft.

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 .

Yeah, it&#x27;s a lot of what you said but if it were the only player in town, then you&#x27;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.

word2vec, invented by Google, killed Google?I mean, it would serve as a terrific headline but I don&#x27;t really buy it, do you?I think it&#x27;s more &quot;Very poor search results, infested with ads, killed Google&#x27;s dreams of becoming the next Microsoft and will now die a slow death and end up making millions instead of billions&quot;.Dying might not be that bad, after all.

What killed Google Search are the AI research papers that ultimately led to the rise of OpenAI

I recently saved this book as it’s been recommended by a few people lately. Interesting

His authorship is mentioned in the story.

&gt; This fact metaphorically depicts how sad this story is.It also highlights how selective the information &amp; context provided in the story is.

And yet, two search engines failed under his tenure. Maybe those who can&#x27;t do should stick to teaching.

Prabhakar Raghavan is an author of &quot;Introduction to Information Retrieval&quot;, the definitive textbook on search at that time. This fact metaphorically depicts how sad this story is.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Introduction-Information-Retrieval-Christopher-Manning&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0521865719" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Introduction-Information-Retrieval-Ch...</a>

That doesn&#x27;t mean his insights are correct, that he&#x27;s a good leader, or that his efforts have been good for us users.It&#x27;s hard to find a bigger name in AI than Minsky, and he wrote one of the most influential books in Computer Science, which put a huge damper on all neutral network progress for decades... Arguably, that was a bad thing.

Yeah he only co-authored 2 highly influential CS textbooks when he wasn&#x27;t failing upward

Favorite bit:&gt; very difficult to find much on Raghavan’s history [..] but from what I’ve gleaned, his expertise lies primarily in “failing up,”

The man who killed Google Search?