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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#171

Post by bitvoid »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #130

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 pe…

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.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#172

Post by debatem1 »

morphentropic wrote: post #82
potatolicious wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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.

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.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#174

Post by spaceman_2020 »

beachy wrote: post #70
arromatic wrote: post #22

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 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.

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

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#175

Post by Eisenstein »

rrrix1 wrote: post #104

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…

Brave search works pretty well.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#176

Post by bitvoid »

gnicholas wrote: post #152

> 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?

IIRC, they combined have about 51% voting shares

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#177

Post by dvt »

kerkeslager wrote: post #83
dvt wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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…

> 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.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#178

Post by ChuckMcM »

ot1138 wrote: post #76

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…

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...

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#179

Post by imzadi »

nbittich wrote: post #102

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.

I just recently switched to Kagi. It's worth paying a few bucks to get decent results.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#180

Post by smt88 »

arromatic wrote: post #22

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 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.

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