It is really nice to have someone to blame. And since things are going wrong (google results _are_ shitty) there is plenty going around. That said, just like no one person is responsible for the success of a company, no one person is responsible for its failure. This material is great for a movie, but not for critical thinking. It _is_ an entertaining read.
My biggest problem with it is that the author seems to be contradicting his own principles. In his about page, he says "Be respectful.". That doesn't apply to him apparently. There is no way he asked this Raghavan dude if he wanted to comment for the article.
The man who killed Google Search?
191–200 of 939 posts
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#192Anybody 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…
"Prabhakar Raghavan is killing Google" "Google's Death from Within: Prabhakar Raghavan" "Blame Prabhakar Raghavan for Google's Crappy Search" "Google Sucks. Because of Prabhakar Raghavan" "Prabhakar Raghavan is the man killing Google Search." "Yahoo Search Killer Prabhakar Raghavan Turns Death Ray on Google" "Prabhakar Raghavan and the no good very bad Google search."
"Prabhakar Raghavan is a bad man" :)
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#193> 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
Ah, looks like this is correct, at least as of 2022:
> Even though such classes of shares were unusual in the tech industry, Brin and Page decided to copy the structure. In the case of Google (now Alphabet), A shares carry one vote, while B shares each carry 10 votes. Brin and Page between them own 51 percent of those B shares, giving them joint control of the company, even though they own less than 12 percent of its total shares.
1: https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/warren-buffett-google-serge...
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
speculation: they care, they know the people involved, and think highly of them. Larry & Sergey are only humans. They can get bamboozled by people just like anyone. And they are in a situation where the very best bamboozlers are trying to bamboozle them, all the time. The people "failing up" are, in some cases, the Lebron James's of bamboozlement. It's quite strange to see very capable people fall for such types, but…
Pichai must be Grima Wormtongue tier bamboozler
trained by the best at McKinsey
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#195Is 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 profits for that piece moving on the right trajectory now in 2024?
Is Google really that hierarchical, that the decisions made by one person lead to all the problems? Maybe I'd believe it, but the article did not convince me that one guy was going against all efforts and better advice to tank the company.
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#196This sounds an awful lot like the Boeing story, even including the “[engineering] class traitor” running the failing division.
Boeing was put on the path to failure by James McNerney. He was their first non-engineer MBA CEO. A literal Jack Welch apprentice. He divested Spirit and chose to build the MAX instead of the 797.
Dennis Muilenburg was an engineer and handled the MAX crisis poorly but wasn’t responsible for the decision to divest key capabilities from Boeing or to optimize short-term sales over long-term survival by building the MAX instead of a new airliner.
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also follow SERoundtable (I have worked as SEO/digital marketer/developer for roughly 20 years), but tend to discount many of the comments due to the assumption that many of the people complaining in broken English may not actually have the quality of site that they believe they do, but there are tons of good sites getting caught up in updates-- not just now, but in every update. The past ~2-3 years have had entire…
So everyone should start making html only site like danluu or pre -2000 ?
that would be fantastic tbqh
the web could be fast!
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#198Phenomenal 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…
How many companies have management consultants taken down? It's quite amazing how bad they are at anything. Peter Thiel's hatred for consultants is really legit.
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#199Is 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”
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#200I switched over to DDG sometime in 2017 or 2018, haven't used Google Search since.
I try. I swear to god I try. Then the DDG search results come up, and they're just dumb. It's like they trained some dog to bring the search results. If it were a dog coming up with them, you would be amazed and rightly so. The dog reads, it vaguely understands the topic you're looking for. It can sort of find something related to it, but not really relevant. But look, it's actually a god doing it. Woohoo. Of course,…
No, it was definitely that good. I remember finding a web page as a child (I think it was some weird webpage about medieval siege weaponry). Several years later, as a teenager, I wanted to find it again. With the right tweaking of search terms, I was able to find the same dang site. This actually happened more than once with multiple topics. If the site was still around, it was findable.
Now? Google search shows you what it wants you to, and damn anything else.
It's not entirely Google's fault - the web has gotten worse. But they take a large share of the blame, and I believe that their failures have played a role in making the web worse.