Edward Zitron has been reading all of google’s internal emails that have been released as evidence in the DOJ’s antitrust case against google.
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 the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google properties, had called a “code yellow” for search revenue due to, and I quote, “steady weakness in the daily numbers” and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind.
HackerNews thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
MetaFilter thread: https://www.metafilter.com/203456/The-core-query-softness-continues-without-mitigation
Really weird to stumble onto a blog written by someone you vaguely knew in college almost 20 years ago… Anyway, nice job, Ed Zitron.
He has a podcast too called Better Offline. Just started it up a few months ago.
And has RSS, nice.
I know the feeling. I went to middle school with Hillel Wayne
I’d never heard of Ed Zitron but this is the second good blog I’ve seen by them this week.
Wonder how this isn’t bigger news. The story is shocking, but absolutely confirms my gut feeling that google search has gone to shit in the last few years, and was fine before
anyone can tldr?
Google internal politics ousted the last of the OG Google guys and replaced him with the same person who killed Yahoo, Prabhakar Raghavan.
The general consensus is that all of the changes to Google since 2019 were driven by profit instead of trying to find things, like a search engine should. And those decisions were spearheaded by Prabhakar Raghavan, who used the training of a data scientist to run Google into the ground for short term financial gain. Sundae Prichai hired Prabhakar Raghavan directly and then promoted him from Head of Ads to Head of Search after firing the guy who had been helping guide Google Search since 1999.
thx.
replaced him with the same person who killed Yahoo, Prabhakar Raghavan.
Pulled a Boeing
I haven’t read the article at all (I plan to) but this basically confirms everything I have assumed as an outsider for years now.
and replaced him with the same person who killed Yahoo
Proof that everyone can fail upward.
In this rare case, I would totally suggest you read the article. It has the perfect amount of humor mixed with shocking facts (revealed via email evidence from the Google antitrust case) and it wraps it all up in a way that’s easy to understand.
Hey, I follow up your suggestion - come back and read the article. No doubt, a very engaging read. Thx.
Based on this particular comment chain and your decision to come back and read the article, i decided to read it as well. Very engaging, indeed! Learned quite a bit, def worth the time. I even subscribed to Ed’s newsletter, lol
A man named Raghavan has been taken on as a major operational manager for yahoo, ibm, etc. Seems his direction of their operations lines up with a sudden collapse in quality in the areas he was at. Regardless everyone seems to discuss how he is one of the best researchers in field. The dark design, and other issues, google has been seeing an increase in, for years, is basically his direction and, while he isn’t the CEO, he basically runs google.
thx.
I keep wondering who’s gonna hire away Ben Gomes after they read this.
Jeeves?
[Warning: “ideas guy” tier babble]
It’s somewhat clear that search engines are too prone to go to shit, either due to malice or something worse (like stupidity).
Based on that, I wonder if a user-run, free-as-speech and open source decentralised search system wouldn’t work. Roughly in the spirit of torrents - where anyone can use the system but if you’re using it you’re expected to contribute with it too.
You just described the categories pages many search engines had before Google. Or proto Web 2.0 bookmark sharing sites like del.icio.us. Sites like Metafilter also existed as a kind of Internet index before everyone was adding reddit.com to their Googling. It’s a laudable idea, but these systems all seem to fall prey to market manipulation in much the same way that SEO helped kill Google.
It’s interesting that you mention MetaFilter, because they’re literally in the process of transitioning fully to a non-profit organization.
https://metatalk.metafilter.com/26430/MeFi-Nonprofit-Update-March-26-2024
They’re the only aggregator that still isn’t flooded with ads and has pretty decent moderation policies.
There’s absolutely a reason I linked to the discussion over there: because it’s quality, and it’s the first place I saw the article pop up.
Wow, that’s really neat.
Thanks for letting me know about MetaFilter and its transition to NPO. This really seems like a great move for the site.
I’ve heard of the site before, but haven’t had the chance to try it before. Guess a bit late is better than never, right? :D
I was thinking on something slightly different. It would be automatic; a bit more like “federated Google” and less like old style indexing sites. It’s something like this:
- there are central servers with info about pages on the internet
- you perform searches through a program or add-on (let’s call it “the software”)
- as you’re using the software, performing your search, it’ll also crawl the web and assign a “desirability” value to the pages, with that info being added to the server that you’re using
- the algorithm is open and, if you so desire, you can create your own server and fork the algorithm
It would be vulnerable to SEO, but less so than Google - because SEO tailored to the algorithm being used by one server won’t necessarily work well for another server.
Please, however, note that this is “ideas guy” tier. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s unviable, for some reason that I don’t know.
There was (is?) the yacy project which used a distributed index, and the individual nodes would contribute to the index.
A hybrid of original Yahoo! and Google is probably the best option. Sites submit themselves, they get reviewed, and an algorithm catalogs the contents. So curation and automatic indexing together.
That exists, it’s called Searx, and in my experience it isn’t great
No that still uses traditional search engines in the background
Searx is a meta-engine, as bdonvr mentioned.
since i changed the instances i use, it works great for me
There’s also some minor discussion in the MeFi thread about “federated search” as well.
Self-hosted search also seems like a strong possibility.
The problem that I see with self-hosting is that it isn’t a practical reality for most people, due to different tech expertises and machine capabilities. Instead I think that a better system would allow you to simply install some software, and contribute as much as you can while you use it.
I’m not informed on MetaFilter. From your other comment it seems that it’s also an indexing site (besides being a community - from their “About” page). Is this correct?
From your other comment it seems that it’s also an indexing site (besides being a community - from their “About” page). Is this correct?
Yes, it’s got a really old-school layout, because it’s been around since 1999. To me, the fact that they’ve managed to avoid advertising for 25 years while having the main indexing site as well as things like Ask MetaFilter, IRL meetups, and even a jobs board, it means they’ve been pretty darn good at managing their finances and figuring out how to support the site long-term without ads. They’re also in the process of becoming an actual non-profit organization. They pay their moderators a living wage, because it’s a job. That’s… pretty amazing.
The comment section takes a bit to get used to, because it’s just chronological order of comments, no sorted threads. Very, very old school web ethos. However, if you can get used to it, some really amazing discussion can happen in there.
One of the benefits of the ways MeFi posts work is often you have users doing massive amounts of research and providing literally mountains of links and analysis, you can get pretty lost in the weeds on some posts.
It’s been the source of high quality discussions for a long time and there’s some really interesting professionals on there who have been staples of the community for a long time. Think hackernews and how many people it has from the industry, but instead of it all being tech people (MeFi has it own share of techies) it is thoughtful and sometimes expert opinion from a large variety of disciplines, as well as first person accounts from people of all walks of life.
It’s also where I first found this link (The Man Who Killed Google Search) and decided to post it here.
Just what I feared, another Indian.
Why do my people keep chasing money at the expense of everything else?
It’s funny how people will find anything to blame except for the problem itself when the problem is capitalism.
And it’s not like we’ve seen anything odd happen when people systematically blame a particular race/religion/nationality in history… /S
Don’t worry guys, it’s not racist because he said they’re “his people”.
Honestly, I’m surprised it took this long for Google to kill its main product over profits. This is in every big company’s textbook.
As an programmer, I want to think out loud about possible technical solutions.
I would have kept the understandable / hand-made algorithm as the core of search results. If you want to do fancy machine learning, do it on the periphery and we can include the machine output in our algorithm and weight its importance by hand. This would allow us to back out of the decision, because we could lower the weight of the machine learning output as needed.
It sounds like Google jumped strait to including the machine learning in the core algorithm though, and now with a decade of complexity in the core algorithm they are no longer able to go back without huge effort.
In general, it’s important to consider “is this a decision we can easily back out of?”.
Google should have improved the search with more powerful tools instead of chasing numbers and greed.
But that’s not how capitalism works!
deleted by creator
It overall seems like a good article but this is why I kind of hate Ed Zirtron’s reporting:
For those unfamiliar with Google’s internal scientology-esque jargon, let me explain. A “code yellow” isn’t, as you might think, a crisis of moderate severity. The yellow, according to Steven Levy’s tell-all book about Google, refers to — and I promise that I’m not making this up — the color of a tank top that former VP of Engineering Wayne Rosing used to wear during his time at the company. It’s essentially the equivalent of DEFCON 1 and activates, as Levy explained, a war room-like situation
Overall the reporting is interesting, but weird comments like this show his naked disdain for everyone and everything in the tech industry which does not make him a particularly trustworthy source.
Like “oh my god, how dare a company choose an arbitrary alert system based on a quirky influential engineer’s practices, what crazy psychos!”
If he sees the code yellow tank top thing as some crazy ridiculous thing that no company should do, then I can’t really trust his interpretation of the rest of the emails and documents etc.
Later in the article, he boils everything down to literally “Heroes vs Villains”, and maybe in this case both of them are archetypal representations of those roles, but based on his appearances on behind the bastards it feels more like he always needs to boil everything down to black and white, good vs evil, bastard vs non bastard, with nothing in between, which again, makes it hard to trust his overall interpretations of what he’s read.
If I hear code yellow, I assume I need to grab a mop and bucket.
Overall the reporting is interesting, but weird comments like this show his naked disdain for everyone and everything in the tech industry which does not make him a particularly trustworthy source.
I’d disagree - what this shows is only disdain for everyone who’s fucking up technologies for the sake of profit. And I’m with him there, I found it refreshing to read an accurate account of what pieces of shit work behind the scenes in the industry. Not that I am surprised, but the account of what seems to have happened in detail and in that sequence was new to me.
I’d disagree - what this shows is only disdain for everyone who’s fucking up technologies for the sake of profit.
Well you can disagree all you want but I don’t see how you can read his snarky comments and think that.
His criticism of the code yellow is not because anyone involved in the code yellow procedure, invention, or naming deserves anything. He just hates everyone in tech so much that a whimsical name must be a bastard move, and not just people at their job trying to make the most of it.
I found it refreshing to read an accurate account of what pieces of shit work behind the scenes in the industry
Yeah, cause you’re accepting his characterizations of everyone as bastards at face value despite not knowing them and despite knowing that Ed Zirtron thinks everyone is a bastard because it makes his world simpler. Yes it is “refreshing” to stop thinking about complex chains of actions and consequences and just think “he’s an evil bastard man and it’s all his fault”.
“[considering] everyone as bastards” is a strawman argument. Furthermore, the people described are assholes by the evidence provided, assuming the evidence is noy falsified.
Furthermore, the people described are assholes by the evidence provided
No, far from it. Noone involved with the naming of the code yellow name has any evidence of bastardry presented at all.
Hunter S Thompson wrote a scathing eulogy for Richard Nixon, which I think is relevant here:
“Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism – which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.”
(Non paywalled link: https://web.archive.org/web/20150213034115/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a-crook/308699/)
Sometimes, you need one or two journalists who are in a position to say “you know what? These people suck, and I’m sick of pretending they don’t”. It doesn’t need to be every journalist, and it probably shouldn’t be, but someone needs to say it.
Yeah, I mean that’s kinda of the whole conceit of Behind the Bastards, the host is explicitly and inherently calling everyone they cover a bastard by default, but if you listen to Ed Zirtron’s appearances, he always just immediately wants to boil them down to a bastard as the root cause of their actions, when the literal entire point of that show is to examine what factors and backgrounds turn someone into a bastard.
Or again, I just can’t understand why he would be flabbergasted by a company naming their alert system after an early engineers’ tank top colour. Does he think all quirkiness and whisky should be outlawed from the workplace?
Yes, there’s value in calling people bastards and scum and villains, but Ed Zirtron does it immediately, every time, which makes his judgement of them untrustworthy. There’s the old adage that “if everything hurts when you poke it your finger is broken”, in Ed’s case given that everyone is always a bastard or a hero, it seems more plausible to me that he has some pathological need to boil everything down to simple binary systems.
There’s quirkiness and [whimsy?], and there’s needless obfuscation. ‘Code Yellow’ meaning ‘Code Red’ is dumb. Like I get it, it probably started as an equivalent to ‘Code Wayne’ and subverting expectations is funny, but it’s a punchline from an old adult swim show more than anything. I get that Google HQ isn’t a Hospital or the military, but sometimes clarity is important. More now because they’re actively doing contracts for governments and militaries, not a scrappy startup. They became a trusted resource and are now cannibalizing themselves for short term gains.
Whimsy at the top of a company while their workers are protesting their actions isn’t great.
There’s quirkiness and [whimsy?], and there’s needless obfuscation. ‘Code Yellow’ meaning ‘Code Red’ is dumb. Like I get it, it probably started as an equivalent to ‘Code Wayne’ and subverting expectations is funny, but it’s a punchline from an old adult swim show more than anything. I get that Google HQ isn’t a Hospital or the military, but sometimes clarity is important. More now because they’re actively doing contracts for governments and militaries, not a scrappy startup. They became a trusted resource and are now cannibalizing themselves for short term gains.
If someone at a company tells you “code yellow” do you stop what you’re doing and follow your drilled into memory code yellow training from school, or do you say “hey, what does code yellow mean?”. They’re not obfuscating anything, they’ve just got a company procedure with a quirky name.
Shitting on that just shows that you are looking for things to shit on them for, rather than being a thoughtful critic pointing out valid flaws.
The amount sadness for the loss of Google Search accuracy due to ad infiltration the author writes here shows how much of a corporate brand dick rider a lot of people are.
These corporations do not give a fuck about you, so mourning their loss is so pathetic.
No one cares Google sucks now. If you do, go get a fucking life. Move on and use something else for fucks sake. They won’t care if you’re dead, why do you cry when these corporations die?
it’s not that the company died, it’s that collective progress was sacrificed for greed.
Not everyone’s got the capability to make up for the lost utility in the tool themselves. Should they just go fuck themselves?
Yes, SloppySol, they should indeed go fuck themselves.
Ah. Well.
There it tis.
Maybe because it’s hard to find stuff now? I don’t care about the company.
I’m not sad that Google turned out to be evil because I care about Google. I don’t care about Google. I’m disappointed in no longer being able to search for and find the things online on any search engine.
Right, so with all me very specific troubleshooting questions I should go where exactly?
Ecosia? Very limited search results
Yandex? More obscure results, probably not what I’m looking for
Bing? Ok on general stuff, not great on very specific questions
Yahoo? Never tried it, heard the enshittification has become bad
Duckduckgo and similar? Proxying Google
Edit: apparently it’s proxying Bing and not Google. Idk if that’s better but I got that wrong.
There is no way to get around Google. Everything else is either highly specialized, very limited or unusable in general.
Also feel free to chime in with your experience, I’m so down to hear what everyone has to say.
I’m pretty sure Duckduckgo proxies Bing, not Google.
I’ve been enjoying Kagi, although it also proxies google and others, and you have to pay for it, and I was dismayed to read on Lemmy recently that the CEO may be a sea lion. So yeah, the search for good search continues I suppose
https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770
For folks not understanding the sealioning reference.
https://d-shoot.net/files/kagiemails.txt
I think this is petty and sad behavior from the CEO of a company and I think this is a man that does not understand boundaries at ALL.
And you know what I truly believe? I already thought this before based on seeing his responses to feedback, but I believe it a thousand times more now that I’ve been on the receiving end: I think it genuinely eats him alive that someone doesn’t agree with him or doesn’t think he’s doing great work, and he also truly believes that if he can just keep explaining himself to them they’ll OBVIOUSLY see it his way. He cannot accept that someone might think Kagi sucks, to the point where he has to reach out to someone like me to try to argue them into Thinking Correctly.
Searx exists and is decentralized although as for the quality of results that’s up in the air
DDG proxies Bing you silly fuck
Use SearXNG
It’s not just google that sucks. All of the rest have tanked/sucked ass to begin with.
