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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#551

Post by cbsmith »

yifanl wrote: post #497
cbsmith wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of understanding the dynamic though, That Fucking Guy doesn't really help. At best it can be emblematic of the underlying dysfunction, but in reality, with complex organizational dynamics, it's the underlying forces that empower That Fucking Guy that are important to understand, because the whole problem is that their function in the organization are an inevitable consequence of the dysfunction, and with pro…

Err, I'll walk it back a little. Corporate decisions are just people's decisions, and though it's probably not just Raghavan, it was _somebody_'s decision to have Google spam our homepages. Maybe we just need to be better at navigating who _somebody_ is, organizations can only be so complex at the top.

It's nice to think that with the right leadership, companies will behave differently. "Organizations can only be so complex at the top" implies that only the dynamic at the top of the company drives its behaviour. It's simple, and it helps to justify tremendous compensation. It's just not true. PR came into Google with a relatively modest role. He only became elevated to a more significant role because of the dynamics of how the company functions, and you'd have to think him a fool for his decisions to not be informed by those dynamics. Sure, he came out on top and his choices were his own, but it's foolish to think that if someone else had come out on top, their choices would really be all that different. The organizational dysfunction ensured that whomever was in that role would make those choices.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#552

Post by Willish42 »

phyzome wrote: post #481
romanhn wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"Class traitor" isn't a juvenile insult. It has a fairly well-defined meaning and describes a set of problematic behaviors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_traitor Are you saying that it's an incorrect description, or are you just generally against accusing people of things?

Thanks for the link. I also took the term as clearly being used to describe the dynamic between managers and the engineers / coding "class" within a company. At Google, those lines are admittedly probably a lot blurrier, but I think the term gets the author's point across in this context.

Like, if we can't allow some level of incisive criticism of extremely well paid tech executives, who have a massive influence on technology, in an article/blog describing feasible harm by said people to said industry, on the "talk about technology news" website, I honestly don't know what the point of forums, blogging, or the internet even is.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#555

Post by cbsmith »

ryeights wrote: post #550
sumanthvepa wrote: post #537

Full Disclosure: Prabhakar Raghavan was my skip-level manager at Yahoo! and I'd known of him well before that, from my days at IBM Research. The author says very few people knew who Raghavan was. Clearly he isn't a computer scientist. It is more an indication of the ignorance of the writer than anything else. Raghavan's contributions to Computer Science and, Search in particular, which were made long before he joined…

The author called Sundar a McKinsey consultant, not Raghavan. >A quick note: I used “management consultant” there as a pejorative. While he exhibits all the same bean-counting, morally-unguided behaviors of a management consultant, from what I can tell Raghavan has never actually worked in that particular sector of the economy. It also seems like a stretch to say that Yahoo's former "Chief Strategy Officer" had no in…

He called Raghavan a "management consultant", whilst acknowledging that he never was a management consultant. It's slinging pejorative nonsense labels.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#556

Post by joeyh »

dang wrote: post #101

Anybody have a better title? 'Better' here means (1) less baity; (2) more accurate and neutral; and (3) preferably a representative phrase from the article itself. "The man who killed Google Search" is too baity. See the 'unless' in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html : " Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait " Edit (since there are objections): I'm not taking a position for…

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

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#557

Post by minetest2048 »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #488
gverrilla wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YT Shorts recommendations are a joke. I'm an atheist and very rarely watch anything related to religion, and even so Shorts put me in 3 or 4 live prayers/scams (not sure) the last few months.

YT Shorts itself is kind of a mystery to me. It's an objective degradation of the interface; why on earth would I want to use it? It doesn't even allow adjustment of the playback speed or scrubbing!

You can scrub on the mobile player, that's what makes it so much frustrating because you can't do that on desktop

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#558

Post by cbsmith »

bbor wrote: post #337
candiodari wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A) This is short-sighted. What you're suggesting is in fact a way to optimize short-term gain over long-term viability. It's pure MBA tactics. Additionally, it's complete and total oversimplification. If you look at Google's earnings it's pretty damn clear that at least until 2020 they were not just going for maximum total spend, but for a steady, gradual raise in total spend. Not too slow, not too fast. They were NO…

Totally agree on the overall prognosis of Google - I am (also?) one of said engineers! Here’s a recent update from a tiny corner of the company: the rank and file is still incredibly smart and generally well-intentioned, but are following hollow simulacrums of the original culture - all-hands, dogfooding, internal feedback, and ground-up engineering priorities are all maintained in form, but they are now rendered com…

Ironically (and unsurprisingly), it's a repeat of what happened at Yahoo. ;-)

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#560

Post by mbesto »

etempleton wrote: post #308
sailfast wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed - I can appreciate the sentiment and the history, but the ad hominem is not really necessary to prove the point and undermines the credibility of the post. I still use Google, but man has it become difficult to get to what I want.

I agree, but all of the alternatives are no better. Bing and Duck Duck Go are okay sometimes, but truly terrible other times. Google is consistently worse than it once was, but still better than the competition. I know search is hard to do well, but if Google is truly floundering where is the startup that for it better and not just better for a very specific niche area, but truly better across the board?

I've used DDG and wanted to like it. I used another paid one and it wasn't great (forgot name). I've been on Kagi for the last 6 months and love it.
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