The Man Who Killed Google Search
Edward Zitron has been reading all of google's internal emails that have been released as evidence in the DOJ's antitrust case against google.
This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it.
The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google properties, had called a “code yellow” for search revenue due to, and I quote, “steady weakness in the daily numbers” and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind.
HackerNews thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
MetaFilter thread: https://www.metafilter.com/203456/The-core-query-softness-continues-without-mitigation
anyone can tldr?
Google internal politics ousted the last of the OG Google guys and replaced him with the same person who killed Yahoo, Prabhakar Raghavan.
The general consensus is that all of the changes to Google since 2019 were driven by profit instead of trying to find things, like a search engine should. And those decisions were spearheaded by Prabhakar Raghavan, who used the training of a data scientist to run Google into the ground for short term financial gain. Sundae Prichai hired Prabhakar Raghavan directly and then promoted him from Head of Ads to Head of Search after firing the guy who had been helping guide Google Search since 1999.
Pulled a Boeing
thx.
Proof that everyone can fail upward.
I haven't read the article at all (I plan to) but this basically confirms everything I have assumed as an outsider for years now.
In this rare case, I would totally suggest you read the article. It has the perfect amount of humor mixed with shocking facts (revealed via email evidence from the Google antitrust case) and it wraps it all up in a way that's easy to understand.
Hey, I follow up your suggestion - come back and read the article. No doubt, a very engaging read. Thx.
Based on this particular comment chain and your decision to come back and read the article, i decided to read it as well. Very engaging, indeed! Learned quite a bit, def worth the time. I even subscribed to Ed's newsletter, lol
A man named Raghavan has been taken on as a major operational manager for yahoo, ibm, etc. Seems his direction of their operations lines up with a sudden collapse in quality in the areas he was at. Regardless everyone seems to discuss how he is one of the best researchers in field. The dark design, and other issues, google has been seeing an increase in, for years, is basically his direction and, while he isn't the CEO, he basically runs google.
thx.
The guy who is now in charge of Google’s search division is the guy who ran Yahoo’s search division into the ground about 10-15 years ago