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This is a great article that is relevant to both the decline in quality of Google search as well as tech culture as a whole. Not sure why it’s getting downvoted - seems like all adjacent posts are getting downvoted?
FTA:
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 — a tumultuous period that cemented its terminal decline, and effectively saw the company bow out of the search market altogether. His responsibilities? Research and development for Yahoo’s search and ads products.
Not a great article - interesting elements but derailed by a loss of focus on what the actual story is. It has some core important pieces of information in it - essentially that in 2019 there was a push by the ads and finance parts of Google to undermine the search part. They had been kept separate up to that point, but when Google was failing to reach arbitrary revenue growth targets ads and finance pushed to change search in favour of money over quality. The head of search pushed back, search being separate from the money men and focusing on quality had been what lead to Google dominating. Then they seem to oust the head of search and out the head of ads in charge.
That is an interesting story and is informative. But instead much of the article is actually some kind of character assassination of the guy who became the new head of search as if he is responsible for the whole thing. It’s a long article and it does have some interesting insights to what happened at yahoo but it’s all a bit derailed by the focus on one person.
The reality is Google is just another corporation and its number one priority is shareholder growth whatever the cost. The individuals are kinda irrelavent - they’re doing what they have to do in the paradigm set up by the company and the stock market. Unrealistic perpetual growth always meant that eventually search was going to be trashed in favour of whatever makes as much money as possible.
If it hadn’t been that guy it’d have been someone else. If you set unrealistic expectations and targets, then the managers and the employees will do whatever it takes to meet them so they get their bonus and pay rise. It’s the bigger picture that is fucked up.
What’s happened at Google is exactly what happened to all it’s competitors when Google started. Google stood out by making search that worked and separated from the ad content. Google has destroyed its core product and it’s yet to be seen if another of the scrappy start ups will take advantage of Google failures.