Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/23/how-one-power-hungry-leader-destroyed-google-search.html
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What a great read about a terrible thing.
I just subscribed to his podcast “Better Offline”, looking forward to hearing more from EZ.
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I use Duck Duck Go which uses Bing. The idea that MS Bing is just as good as Google is kind of a sad thing.
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It’s just the enshittification cycle yet again…
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With his lack of basic foresight, it makes you wonder how Raghavan made it as far as he did. (well, not really)
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Someone posted a link to a new ‘AI’ powered search (I thought it was in this thread, maybe deleted?). I checked it out, testing it on an obscure thing that I have a good deal of knowledge about, and sure enough, while it managed to get a bunch of stuff right, there was also confidently wrong hallucinations as well. Are we done with AI yet? Dogpile and Duck Duck Go are my current go-tos.
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If you’re able to get record profits for several years in a row, you can make it to the c-suite. No one there cares about the scorched earth behind you or the famines coming in the future. So long as your numbers this quarter are good, it’s all rainbows and unicorns (and big fat bonuses) all around!
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Know how to say “this seed corn looks fucking delicious” like it’s a sophisticated analysis is a very special skill.
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And yet, here we are. I use Bing now which I feel weird about but deal with it.
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What amazes me is that Google would both hire and promote someone who helped make yahoo what it is today.
If it crawls out a sinking ship, fleshy tail wiggling, whiskers still wet, do you assume that it’s leadership material rather than a rat?
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Interesting. I’m also using Perplexity as well. Among other things, I am happy with how it immediately tells me if it can’t find what I’m looking for. As opposed to keeping me scrolling. Knowing something definitely didn’t work frees me to try another way or just drop the search entirely.
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Silicon Valley is full of mysterious and mythical places…but mostly it’s just repackaged hype sold over and over again.
This is the result of taking technology out of the hands of real builders and handing it to managers at a time when “management” is synonymous with “staying as far away from actual work as possible.” And when you’re a do-nothing looking to profit as much as possible, you only care about growth. You’re not a user, you’re a parasite, and it’s these parasites that have dominated and are draining the tech industry of its value.
If you work in tech long enough, you find that this process is inevitable. From my count, we’re now in at least the fourth cycle of tech boom/bust since the early 90’s. The names change but the game goes on and on…
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I previously worked at a relatively small but well-known company in it’s field, who hired a Yahoo executive. Those of us in the rank and file questioned whether that was actually a positive credential or not.
Fast forward a few years, and that executive made some pretty questionable decisions and ended up being moved to where they could do less harm. The company itself has fallen down a couple pegs as well. Some of that is just unavoidable in the market, but they also experienced some key personnel leaving because of the questionable direction that led them towards hiring that ex-Yahoo exec.
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It certainly did hurt the user experience and may well sow the seeds for the company’s eventual downfall, but in the meantime ad revenue is way up:
The current stock price is also about triple what it was in 2020.
I hate it, but from a purely greed-based, short term profit perspective it appears that the strategy worked exactly how he wanted it to.
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(I’ve been using Perplexity more than Google lately.)
And I’ve been drinking water more than driving lately. Perplexity isn’t a search engine.
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I’ve been a Google fan for years, but recently I’ve started trying out Bing search, and I’ve found it rather good. (Or perhaps rather less bad, which is kind of what enshittification is all about.)
There are some things Google software does very well, such as file locking and version control, but their commercialisation of everything like online storage and is increasingly intrusive.
However, I’m kind of trapped in the Android Matrix, and the alternative is the Apple Matrix, which is shinier but more expensive.
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See Boeing, also.
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I’ve heard the complaint a number of times that businessmen took over running Boeing and ruined the fine company that was previously built and run by Engineers, but FWIW the CEO at the time of the fatal 737 Max crashes was Dennis Muilenberg, an engineer by training who had started out at Boeing in 1985 and rose through the ranks. Tragically, he turned out to be capable of just as much greed and short-term profit-driven motivations as any other CEO. As far as I’m concerned he has the blood of hundreds of innocent people on his hands.
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the last week or two, when i search via google, there’s now a big block of ml driven text that tries to summarize the search
so. no. not yet 
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