211–220 of 939 posts
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"Linkbait" implies it's hyperbole, but I would argue that the headline is a perfect description of the argument being made here.
Linkbait is about using tricks to grab attention rather than providing neutral information. Hyperbole is only one way to do that. In this case "The man who" is a linkbait trope and "killed" is a sensational attention-grabby word. Composing them into "the man who killed" is linkbait.
Is Google desktop search dead? It's certainly been "shittier" but it's been adequate. Unlike Bing and Yahoo, there isn't clickbait fake news all over the screen. In a market where competitors are a bookmark away, it should be dead, but the big names seem to all collude on having a bad experience that makes more short-term money. How is success being measured internally for "the man who killed Google Search"? Are prof…
> clickbait fake news all over the screen That’s my current experience with Google search as well, even for the most direct and obvious technical queries like “do X in Y language”
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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…
What is definition of dead? 15 years later they have huge majority of traffic share and lots of revenue.
I have a strong memory of watching a Jacques Cousteau documentary on sharks and learning that Sharks could become mortally wounded but not realize it because of how their nervous system was structured. As a kid I thought that was funny, as an engineer watching companies in the Bay Area die it was more sobering.
If you have read the article, I think Gomes was right and saw search as a product, whereas Raghavan saw it as a tool for shoveling ads. A good friend of mine who worked there until 2020 wouldn't tell me why they left, but acknowledged that it was this that finally "ruined" Google.
Their cash cow is dying, I know from running a search engine what sort of revenue you can get from being "just one of the search engine choices" versus the 800lb gorilla. Advertisers are disillusioned, and structurally their company requires growth to support the stock price which supports their salary offerings. There is a nice supportable business for about 5,000 - 8,000 people there, but getting there from where they are?
My best guess at the moment is that when they die, "for reals" as they say, their other bets will either be spun off or folded, their search team will get bought by Apple with enough infrastructure to run it, Amazon or someone else buys a bunch of data centers, and one of the media companies buys the youtube assets.
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I thought it was a very good description. The person mentioned is responsible for turning one of the most important pieces of software used by billions, into user-hostile experiences that's better for only a few, including himself, just for profits.
As context, I offer the engineer oath used by some countries for certified engineers: >> I am an Engineer. In my profession, I take deep pride. To it, I owe solemn obligations. >> As an engineer, I pledge to practice integrity and fair dealing, tolerance and respect, and to uphold devotion to the standards and dignity of my profession. I will always be conscious that my skill carries with it the obligation to serve h…
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…
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 ?
The hostility was simply this. One day we had a dedicated high level Google engineer helping us out and giving us guidance (and even special tags) to get the data we needed in a cost effective manner for both Google and us. The next day, he was gone and we received demands to know exactly what we were doing, why and even sensitive information about our business. After several months of such probing, we were summarily told that the access we had was revoked and that there was no recourse.
We circumvented by setting up thousands of unique IP addresses in 50+ countries throughout the world and pointing our spiders at Google through them (same as they do to everyone else). These were throttled to maintain very low usage rates and stay off the radar. We continually refilled our queues with untouched IPs in case any were ever blacklisted (which happened occasionally).
As for what we did, we sampled ads for every keyword under the sun, aggregated and analyzed them to find out what was working and what wasn't. This even led to methods for estimating advertiser budgets. At one point, we had virtually every Google advertiser and their ongoing monthly spend, keywords and ad copy in our database. Highly valuable to smart marketers who were looking for an edge.
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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…
What is definition of dead? 15 years later they have huge majority of traffic share and lots of revenue.
They're dead when everyone starts to hate them and someone says "no, look how much money they're making, they're fine." That's the fatal blow, because they think they're fine, and keep doing the things that make everyone hate them.
At that point you're just waiting for someone else to offer an alternative. Then people prefer the alternative because the incumbent has been screwing them for so long, and even if they change at that point, it's too late because nobody likes or trusts them anymore, and ships that big can't turn on a dime anyway.
You have to address the rot when customers start complaining about it, not after they've already switched to a competitor.
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.
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.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 ?
That helps explain why Youtube scam campaings in different countries have been rampant for years while Youtube seems to look the other way.