91–100 of 939 posts
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.
That was a couple of years before the rest of us started smelling smoke coming out.
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 "succee…
> 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,…
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.
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.
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.
they have much more money than they really need for everyday happiness.
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 mana…
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.
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.
Agreed. I struggled to keep going after "computer scientist class traitor". A very juvenile take that reflects poorly on the author, IMO.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Not sure what you are getting at. Care to elaborate? Google wouldn’t exist without websites to index.
This reminded me very much - unpleasantly - about literature of the the McDonnell Douglas merger with Boeing.
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 ha…
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.