11mo ago

Ed Zitron documents Prabhakar Raghavan, the actual guy who turned Google Search into complete shit

www.wheresyoured.at The Man Who Killed Google Search

This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it. The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then

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Do you want to know what Prabhakar Raghavan’s old job was? What Prabhakar Raghavan, the new head of Google Search, the guy that has run Google Search into the ground, the guy who is currently destroying search, did before his job at Google?
He was the head of search for Yahoo from 2005 through 2012 [...]
Christ on a stick, the fucking lore I'm learning today. I had never heard the name Prabhakar Raghavan before, but it seems like this dude has been the man behind the curtain in my life for a while. I used to use Yahoo before Google in the early 2000s before it became shit, and then I used Google until it became shit. I hope he doesn't end up applying at DuckDuckGo next season.
- Prabhakar’s mask falls off and it’s Vlad from Kagi
  and then he trips and falls over and we find out Vlad’s just 3 small Peters Thiel in an overcoat
  
  Peters Thiel or Peter Thiels?
- It's crazy, he co-authored the randomized algorithms textbook for a class I had in grad school. That and the information retrieval book he wrote are probably the two biggest components of his engineer cosplay, even to this day.
- I've been wondering whether "a functional web search" is something that will increasingly become impossible as the death of the web progresses.

even the Orange Site hates this fucking guy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
edit: except dang himself, who posts a multi-paragraph comment complaining about the title then edits it to admit he didn't actually read the article. Presumably this is the style of comment desired at HN going forward.
- Edit 2: since there's no consensus on this I'm just going to reify that fact via the trailing-question-mark trick and call it a day.
  Since killing != killed, your comment already shows that the title is misleading.
  (That has a beneficial side effect btw: not having my own opinion about a story makes it easier to not moderate according to my own opinion. I still do that, or try my best to, even when I do have an opinion—but it takes more ATP.)
  danny, please log the fuck off
  
  "You see, if I don't ...[pause..massive bong hit]..get involved, right? If I don't get involved ...[pause..walks to table, grabs a keg, slams it in one go].. then I by default can't be subjected to the problem! [does line of coke off side of now-empty keg] And this way, I can always be perfectly neutral! [coke kicks in] This is how I manage to make HN be so central to everything!"
  
  trailing-question-marks: the consensus bypassing trick anarchists don't want you to know?
- The amount of tone-policing in the comments is sickening though.
  
  So your average HN thread, then.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40139636
  will no one think of the poor baby exec who makes 8 figures? how could they be so mean to him??
  
  stole your comment, so there
  
  I’d rather people dogpile executives instead of entertainers and athletes like they do today

This is what speaking truth to power is supposed to be. EZ tearing the facade of modern tech is a service to everyone, including people inside the tech industry.
The only gripe I have with this article is that I'm not convinced why the metric of "we want people to query more on Google" should be concerning to me. That just sounds like "we want more people to use our product more", which is a completely reasonable metric for any business, no? In the Better Offline podcast he even says "this sounds paranoid of me but no, Google officially said this" and I'm like... ye, sure? Why would that be scary? If the metric was "userads per minute" or something then ye, that'd be Facebook level fuckery, but...
- because (a) it's trivially growth-hacked by making it suck (b) they did in fact growth-hack it by making it suck, and presumably this was obvious to many involved.
  
  I guess, but any usage metric can be similarly growth-hacked in my mind. I guess what I'm missing is: is there a more reasonable metric to drive your business, even assuming you're not a malicious exec and actually care about your service?
- “we want people to query more on Google” should be concerning to me
  one reading of it could be "we want people to spend more time on our web properties" with the implied "(and less on anyone else's)". and it does, at least in what was observed on google's actions, bear out over the past few years
  (and then also the bit that david said)
- The only gripe I have with this article is that I’m not convinced why the metric of “we want people to query more on Google” should be concerning to me. That just sounds like “we want more people to use our product more”, which is a completely reasonable metric for any business, no?
  It's a search engine, so if it's taking you more queries than previously to find what you're looking for, that means the quality of the search results has decreased.
  Instead of the search team being able to focus on quality as they had been, they were more or less pushed to sabotage the quality of search in order to increase ad revenue.
  That's my understanding, anyway.
- Well there are two ways to look at improving software (in this case), either we should improve the effectiveness of the tool to do its primary function. Or we should make it sticky so people get forced to use it no matter what to increase our profits.
  In video games it would be if an AAA manager suddenly goes 'we should become more like mobile/facebook games'.
  And as we have seen what happened to google, (isn't it 20/20) we know what he meant with that. The context is important here.
  It has certainly worked, more and more times I notice that I need to add additional words to my searched because it keeps finding stuff I don't care about, and god forbid if you pick a search term that their internal system can map into a sellable product. (A while back I was searching for something and it kept deciding that one of the words was also related to a drink (even if I didn't search for that term specifically) so all my results were commercial drink related stuff. You know the thing where google turns a part of the search result bold to show you that was why you got the result).
- I read it more as "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?"

I'm sorry David, I think you meant to title this:
"Ed Zitron documents Prabhakar Raghavan? The actual guy who turned Google Search into complete shit?"

What a weird hit piece.
- if only it was about anything of any importance in the world
  
  It's a narrative whose connection with reality is hard to discern. One could instead say enshittification is an emergent and often unstoppable force, carried out by whoever happens to be in place at the time. The Zitron piece is more like the "great man theory" in reverse. It evokes a shining counterfactual picture where without the evil villain Raghavan messing things up, Google Search would be wonderful (let's ignore Google's perennial other failures, privacy invasions, etc). If only that one specific electron had gone through the other slit, everything would be different! Reality is rarely like that. All roads tend to lead to the same place.

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