The Man Who Killed Google Search

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: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976

MetaFilter thread: metafilter.com/…/The-core-query-softness-continue…

Buttons,
@Buttons@programming.dev avatar

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?”.

yamanii,
@yamanii@lemmy.world avatar

Did you read the piece? This isn’t a software issue, it got worse by design to push even more ads and stop suppressing the ad-ridden fake sites too.

slumberlust,

Amazon (and I’m sure others) refers to this as a two way door. Good rollouts minimize impact and can be undone easily.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Exactly, and that’s something my company is aggressively moving toward, even though our userbase is nothing like Google’s. It’s just good engineering to be able to rapidly undo an unfavorable rollout.

bitwaba,

Google’s operations are absolutely built around the idea of easy rollback. Their products, and the their entire product ecosystem, are not.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yeah, they seem to do “easy roll-foward.” Any service is subject to replacement, given a sufficiently motivated project manager. So if there’s a problem in deployment, they just replace the whole thing.

corsicanguppy,

“emails”

It’s like saying “trafficks” or “firmwares”.

corsicanguppy,

It still is.

masterspace, (edited )

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.

GreatAlbatross,
@GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk avatar

If I hear code yellow, I assume I need to grab a mop and bucket.

WhiskyTangoFoxtrot,

And an illustrated book about birds.

TurtleJoe,
@TurtleJoe@lemmy.world avatar

It seems clear to me that he hates the people that are ruining the tech industry, ripping off customers, and pumping out shitty projects for short term stuck pumps, and he takes every opportunity to shit on those people and point out their idiosyncrasies. That’s pretty much every tech CEO these days.

It’s also pretty clear to me that he believes in the promise of the industry, and thinks that workers deserve better than the people that they work for.

Telodzrum, (edited )

It’s like a reverse Kara Swisher. Which, though I hate her work and her complete lack of integrity, I don’t want. I totally get and agree with your take.

jqubed,
@jqubed@lemmy.world avatar

It’s an interesting piece and starts in the traditional journalism mold, but moves much more into opinion and blog. Like going from NewsHour to Last Week Tonight. That’s not to say it’s not an interesting read or he’s not supporting his argument, but it is about persuading, not just reporting. Of course, I haven’t actually gone through all his references to see if they’re mischaracterized or taken out of context.

Moneo,

I agree with both your comments, but there’s something so satisfying about reading vitriol about a type of person you fucking hate. I kinda liked that he doesn’t hide his bias or disdain for these people.

frezik,

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: web.archive.org/web/20150213034115/…/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.

masterspace,

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.

bitwaba,

There’s the old adage that “if everything hurts when you poke it your finger is broken”

I feel Iike the correct application of this analogy here is “if everyone you examine is a bastard, you’re the bastard.”

turmacar,

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.

masterspace,

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.

raspberriesareyummy,

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.

masterspace, (edited )

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”.

raspberriesareyummy,

“[considering] everyone as bastards” is a strawman argument. Furthermore, the people described are assholes by the evidence provided, assuming the evidence is noy falsified.

masterspace,

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.

Audacious,

Google should have improved the search with more powerful tools instead of chasing numbers and greed.

FenrirIII,
@FenrirIII@lemmy.world avatar

But that’s not how capitalism works!

JigglypuffSeenFromAbove,
@JigglypuffSeenFromAbove@lemmy.world avatar

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.

TheBat,
@TheBat@lemmy.world avatar

deleted_by_moderator

    •
    FlyingSquid,
    @FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

    This reads like, “the Jews run the media and the banks. Trust me, I’m a Jew.”

    TheBat,
    @TheBat@lemmy.world avatar

    Broadly applicable cultural norms aren’t a thing?

    Please come here to Mumbai, try to live as a wagie, and see how far can you go it before the grind breaks you.

    prole,

    Don’t worry guys, it’s not racist because he said they’re “his people”.

    grrgyle,

    It sure feels racist. :/

    EnderMB,

    I’ve no idea why, but Amazon in particular has a huge number of Indian managers. It’s never particularly bothered me, but I do see this sentiment amongst other people of Indian origin - often the most critical of Indian managers.

    Is there something specific about Indian leadership that pushes growth above anything else? The sentiment in Amazon is one of ruthlessness, and pushing growth and positive short-term metrics above everything else.

    Eyck_of_denesle,

    Trust me, Indian managers are considered ruthless by most fellow indians from what I heard. Our workspace culture is quite toxic compared to the west.

    Look at this for a bit more insight

    TheBat,
    @TheBat@lemmy.world avatar

    Is there something specific about Indian leadership that pushes growth above anything else?

    Yes. They’ll micromanage the shit out of everything and throw you under the bus to save their own skin.

    And the mods have removed my comment for ‘Rule 3’. What the fuck.

    misc,

    Bruh don’t be racist its not like americans or brits are not after money india sucks at a lot of things including what you just said but its not like they are the only one’s like that .

    Kbobabob,

    I don’t see anything in the comment that would insinuate that.

    misc,

    Are you by any chance blind ?

    Kbobabob,

    No. Where did it say anything about anyone else? You are the one implying that this only applies to one group. The OP is just saying they are disappointed by a certain group.

    misc,

    🤦

    TheBat,
    @TheBat@lemmy.world avatar

    Sundar Pichai

    Satya Nadella

    Shantanu Narayen (CEO of Adobe since 2008)

    Tech companies with Indian CEOs have defined and refined rent-seeking over innovations.

    Unlike Brin, Page, Zuckerberg, Gates who had interest in technology and the product, these are just fucking yes men who exist to please the board by trying to keep the line going up, as long as they’re not required to take risks themselves.

    They’ll buy competition, give shit pay to employees, and cut costs even if that harns the company in the long run.

    Fuck them.

    prole,

    Oh shit guys he named three people!

    TheBat,
    @TheBat@lemmy.world avatar

    Three people who are steering highly influential mega corporations.

    Piss off.

    prole,

    Do you have any concept of how statistics works? It’s interesting (I mean, maybe but probably not really) that you can name a few greedy Indian tech execs, and act like this is some sort of nationwide or worldwide trend. As if your ability to name three people somehow negates centuries of history of the planet (including India, “your land”) being ravaged by white people for profit at the expense of native populations.

    If you think your ability to name three people is somehow meaningful, why don’t we just take a few minutes on LinkedIn to see who’s running these massive US corporations. If you want to make this a racial thing, let’s see how many of them are old white dudes. Let’s see how many of them ARE LITERALLY RUNNING THE SAME CORPORATIONS YOU REFER TO. But they’ve got one Indian dude in their C-Suite, and for you that’s a smoking gun that this is a problem with their race right?

    Brain broken. Taking you at your word that you’re actually Indian (and that this isn’t some overflow from some ethno-religious, Hindu vs. Muslim bullshit), it’s pretty fucking sad that your mind seems to work this way. Talk about self-loathing.

    prole,

    You know what, I just had a great idea… Why don’t we try to actually make this at least somewhat scientific.

    Let’s compile a list of the worst “most evil” corporations on the planet. Your Nestles, your Amazons, your Down Chemicals, your Union Carbides, your Godman Sachs, your Blackwaters, etc. etc. and break down their C-Suite employees by ethnicity.

    Let’s see how unique this concept of greed is to Indians. I would bet my next paycheck that at the very least it would be a white plurality.

    prowling4973,

    Satya Nadella turned MS around after the disaster years under Balmer. Your racism is blinding you if you think that he’s a problem - from a product perspective or from profit perspective.

    sorghum,
    @sorghum@sh.itjust.works avatar

    Not to take up for his point, but windows 10 was in development years before Nadella. The only version of windows totally under his governance has been the disastrous windows 11. So I guess I have him to thank for finally giving me the kick in the pants to fully switch to Linux.

    I guess the point I need to make is that Microsoft was not good before or during Nadella. There have been bright spots, but not enough for me to have then outweigh all the other crap pulled both during and before Nadella.

    prowling4973,

    Windows is only a small part of MS.

    Nadella gets a lot of/all the credit for Azure which is the only legit competition to AWS.

    O365 has been great for their adoption too.

    And then there’s all the “free” dev tools like GitHub (acquisition), typescript, vs code etc. which bolsters their image.

    I can’t even imagine ms under Balmer giving away that much shit. Hell, I wanted to build apps for lumia and they wanted to charge me an arm and a leg just to get started. This was at a time when their store didn’t have anything going for itself.

    TheBat,
    @TheBat@lemmy.world avatar

    They also fired entire QA department and crowdsourced it to paying customers.

    And it’s not my racism. I’m a born and raised Indian who everyday meets people like these. Our culture is fucked up.

    prowling4973,

    You talk as though every other company in the west hasn’t been enshittified too.

    misc,

    Idk didn’t zuck suppress a lot of war shit to please others ? Sell bad ads ? Bloat his platforms with trackers and ads ? All for profit also there is a really REALLY big reddit thread with all the bad things zuck did .

    TheBat,
    @TheBat@lemmy.world avatar

    I’m not talking about Zuckerberg after 10 years of being a CEO.

    I’m talking about Zuckerberg when he dropped out of college, started Facebook, and actually developed features for his new venture.

    We can hate him for being a piece of shit ghoul that he is, but we can’t deny his technical skills.

    I_Has_A_Hat,

    Ajit Pai comes to mind.

    TheBat,
    @TheBat@lemmy.world avatar

    Not really. Unlike other three, he was not born and brought up in India.

    prole, (edited )

    Are we playing a game where we list the names of greedy fucks who have ruined society? Because I assure you that we’re looking at a ration of 10:1, at least, of white names vs. any other ethnicity. And that’s being extremely generous. It’s all old white dudes.

    Stop fooling yourself. Power is defined by “whiteness,” it’s literally a synonym for systemic power and control. If you’re in a position to negatively affect society in such a way, then you’re white.

    Naming a handful of outliers means nothing. Not to mention that those people have all been furthering the goals of that systemic “white” control structure, regardless of their skin color.

    misc,

    Ah another racist . Why can’t you people just graso the simple that some people are just assholes and its just a person and not a race thing ?

    prole,

    I’m the racist? The fuck lol

    Calling out the person claiming Indian CEOs are greedy because they’re Indian, for being racist is the actual racist.

    Go fuck yourself.

    ricdeh,
    @ricdeh@lemmy.world avatar

    Have the few brain cells of yours ever banded together and maybe considered that if you’re conflating “white” with “negative effects for society”, then maybe you are indeed a racist?

    prole, (edited )

    I didn’t do that, you just did. Try to grasp a little nuance.

    On a systemic level, “white,” is power. Power often means negative, yes.

    In the US, are Italian Americans considered white? Yes. How about Irish? Hard to think of many people whiter than the Irish. I say this as an American of Irish descent.

    And yet, their inclusion in this definition is relatively recent. Up until recently, Irish and Italian people were decidedly not white. And yet, the color of their pale skin…? I don’t understand?

    So clearly, the term (at the systemic level, obviously, I’m not talking about individual racism) is elastic. It is culturally defined in the context of the times.

    At a systemic level, “racism” implies oppression by that power. Oppression against “whiteness” at a systemic level is not possible because there is no power in a position to oppress whites. By definition, they’re at the top.

    I fully expect you to just gloss over everything I said and call me racist again. Maybe someone will read this and think twice about how they view these things.

    misc,

    Bold of you to assume they have braincells

    SupahRevs,

    I don’t think they claimed they were greedy because they were Indian. I think it is more of a question on why the Indian people who have been successful in tech are implementing the profit motive policies and what overlapping culture we share with India that would lead people to that capitalistic goal of profits over product. Isn’t that something worth exploring? I think it already has led to an educational discussion where one commentor mentioned the history of worker actions in India.

    victoitor,

    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

    TheBat,
    @TheBat@lemmy.world avatar

    It’s not funny. Our culture tells us to bow to authority. Be it old people in house and neighbourhood, or boss at work. We are not supposed to criticize them lest we get labelled troublemaker. Just keep your head down and walk down the beaten path.

    These CEOs are just a shining example of these.

    victoitor,

    I’m still not sure you got it.

    There is no issue in criticizing these CEOs. They are horrible indeed. But they are like this and they have been promoted to this spot because we’re in a system (capitalism) which values this behaviour. Not because they’re Indian…

    TheBat,
    @TheBat@lemmy.world avatar

    And I’ll tell you what I told others.

    Come here and try to live like how we live and you’ll understand first hand what I’m trying to say.

    flop_leash_973,

    What it proves is being a greedy self serving prick that will do anything for a buck if given the chance is not the exclusive domain of white people. Anyone can be an incompetent executive.

    TheBat,
    @TheBat@lemmy.world avatar

    Did you see my other comments?

    Google under Brin and Page introduced many useful products, Microsoft became a household name under Gates, same with Photoshop.

    What have these CEOs done after they took the reins? All I can think of is pushing for ‘cloud’.

    Pichai in particular I dislike the most. He was heading the Android team. But last few years Android feels stagnant. He could’ve done much more for his supposedly passion project as the CEO of Alphabet.

    bitwaba,

    That’s reasonable, but you’re forgetting the part where the CEOs don’t want to be the CEO anymore. They’ve got billions and want to spend it doing shit like wifi weather balloons or self driving cars. So they look for someone to replace them, and that replacement doesn’t have the tenure in the position to say “stop the bullshit, I want good products, not half baked ‘revenue generators’”.

    But they do have an army of MBAs in the CFOs office telling them quarterly ad revenue is down 3% year over year, which means the world is ending, so they need to pump those numbers while everyone cashes out their stock before the rest of the stock holders realize the plan is to leave them now holding the bag for the now worthless-page-of-ads-before-search-results company.

    Pretzilla,

    Legit query. and it’s true as a stereotype of many cultures.

    And this particular aspect is also at the heart of global capitalism that is wreaking havoc on the world.

    prowling4973,

    Ah yes, Jerry Dischler, the Indian.

    TheBat,
    @TheBat@lemmy.world avatar

    That was an ad guy doing ad guy things. Why the fuck the product guy do what he did? Cause he didn’t give a shit about his domain.

    Edit: lmao reading it again looks like the ad guy cared more about the search than the actual search guy. Makes you look like a right dingus.

    prowling4973,

    Have you spent any amount of time around software engineers who aren’t from India? You may be idealizing us - a lot.

    I’ve worked extensively with devs from NY, SF and Toronto (where I’m located). The ideal “innovative” “passionate” devs are maybe 2 to a company. The rest just want to put food on the table, buy a house, buy a car, go on vacation and fuck off at the end of the day. How do you think fb and Google built their privacy nightmares? By exclusively hiring Indians? Or by dangling enough money at devs of all races who don’t give a shit?

    Pretty much every single one of my colleagues will gladly write code to turn the product into complete dog shit if the “ad guy” shows up with a million dollar paycheck. What do I care? It’s not my baby. My actual real life baby’s future matters more to me than the future of whatever product my current company is working on.

    Being an Indian yourself does not absolve you of your racist tirades against other Indians. Learn to be empathetic towards others. If I, a privileged dude-bro, can understand why people who grow up with extreme resource contention and competition behave the way they do, then you should get it too.

    grrgyle,

    I think this is just because there are a good number of Indian people in tech. Usually it’s a white person doing this and we hardly notice their skin colour (because of racism).

    India actually has a pretty healthy history of workers banding together in collective action, and coming together in mutual aid. I’d elaborate but my social media minutes are about to run out

    TheBat,
    @TheBat@lemmy.world avatar

    there are a good number of Indian people in tech.

    Yes, as grunt workers (myself included).

    I legit can’t recall many Indian innovators in tech. Even most tech companies here in India are copies of American companies.

    Which again brings me back to my question. What have these CEOs done during their tenure other than rent seeking?

    slaacaa,

    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

    Nobody,

    Prabhakar Raghavan and the McKinsey-inspired management class forced the real tech people out and shit all over the search engine intentionally to squeeze out more short-term profits. Google: An Enshittification Tale

    boyi,

    anyone can tldr?

    gravitas_deficiency,

    The guy who is now in charge of Google’s search division is the guy who ran Yahoo’s search division into the ground about 10-15 years ago

    residentmarchant,

    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.

    boyi,

    Hey, I follow up your suggestion - come back and read the article. No doubt, a very engaging read. Thx.

    frunch,

    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

    ChicoSuave,

    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.

    yamanii,
    @yamanii@lemmy.world avatar

    and replaced him with the same person who killed Yahoo

    Proof that everyone can fail upward.

    boyi,

    thx.

    TheBat,
    @TheBat@lemmy.world avatar

    replaced him with the same person who killed Yahoo, Prabhakar Raghavan.

    Pulled a Boeing

    asdfasdfasdf,

    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.

    Jiggle_Physics,

    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.

    boyi,

    thx.

    lvxferre,
    @lvxferre@mander.xyz avatar

    [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.

    Ultragigagigantic,
    @Ultragigagigantic@lemmy.world avatar

    Seems like something the public library system should be doing. That and hosting websites for the community not for profit but as a public service.

    While I’m on wish list tangent, post offices should be municipal banks and be a free email domain provider.

    ElderWendigo,

    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.

    lvxferre,
    @lvxferre@mander.xyz avatar

    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.

    frezik,

    I think you could do it in Lemmy itself combined with RSS feeds. The mods would curate a list of RSS feeds, and use the keywords to pick the ones for a bot to automatically post (which means if a programming blog did a post about windsurfing, it wouldn’t show up as long as the meta keywords didn’t match). Mods could take suggestions each week for feeds to add or remove.

    SnotFlickerman, (edited )
    @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    It’s interesting that you mention MetaFilter, because they’re literally in the process of transitioning fully to a non-profit organization.

    …metafilter.com/…/MeFi-Nonprofit-Update-March-26-…

    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.

    rollingFlint,

    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

    AVincentInSpace,

    That exists, it’s called Searx, and in my experience it isn’t great

    bdonvr,

    No that still uses traditional search engines in the background

    lvxferre,
    @lvxferre@mander.xyz avatar

    Searx is a meta-engine, as bdonvr mentioned.

    ianovic69,
    @ianovic69@feddit.uk avatar

    I’ve been using foss.family for a little while with good results.

    You have to spend a bit of time selecting and using different instances before you find one that suits you. I tried about three before this one and I don’t think I’ll need to change again.

    merde,

    since i changed the instances i use, it works great for me

    SnotFlickerman,
    @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    There’s also some minor discussion in the MeFi thread about “federated search” as well.

    Self-hosted search also seems like a strong possibility.

    lvxferre,
    @lvxferre@mander.xyz avatar

    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?

    SnotFlickerman, (edited )
    @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    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.

    jollyrogue,

    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.

    en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaCy

    frezik,

    One part of this (which isn’t really covered in the article) is that Google historically had a give-and-take relationship with people gaming search engine results. SEO has been a thing for a long time, and it’s impossible to make it go away. However, Google used to punish sites that took it too far. It wasn’t necessarily ideal, but it worked well enough to keep egregious spam out of the top level results, and companies could still direct users to their site when they had something they were actually looking for. SEO consulting companies sprang up who knew Google’s rules well, and that arguably meant a bunch of grifters being overpaid, but at least the results stayed relevant.

    Google seems to have given up on enforcing many of those rules.

    reddig33,

    I keep wondering who’s gonna hire away Ben Gomes after they read this.

    REdOG,
    @REdOG@lemmy.world avatar

    Duck Duck Gomes

    rigatti,
    @rigatti@lemmy.world avatar

    Really weird to stumble onto a blog written by someone you vaguely knew in college almost 20 years ago… Anyway, nice job, Ed Zitron.

    Brutticus,

    I know the feeling. I went to middle school with Hillel Wayne

    TerkErJerbs,

    He has a podcast too called Better Offline. Just started it up a few months ago.

    0x0,

    And has RSS, nice.

    livus,

    I’d never heard of Ed Zitron but this is the second good blog I’ve seen by them this week.

    BaroqueInMind,

    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?

    mindbleach,

    We’re not sad on their behalf, you lump, we’ve lost them as a valuable resource. All the alternatives work less.

    These fuckers ruined something we needed.

    Wiggums,

    it’s not that the company died, it’s that collective progress was sacrificed for greed.

    someguy3,

    Maybe because it’s hard to find stuff now? I don’t care about the company.

    fuckwit_mcbumcrumble,

    It’s not just google that sucks. All of the rest have tanked/sucked ass to begin with.

    ElderWendigo,

    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.

    SloppySol,

    Not everyone’s got the capability to make up for the lost utility in the tool themselves. Should they just go fuck themselves?

    BaroqueInMind,

    Yes, SloppySol, they should indeed go fuck themselves.

    homesweethomeMrL,

    Ah. Well.

    There it tis.

    hoshikarakitaridia, (edited )
    @hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world avatar

    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.

    SleepyWheel,

    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

    SnotFlickerman,
    @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770

    For folks not understanding the sealioning reference.

    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.

    HarkMahlberg,
    HarkMahlberg avatar

    Oh no... Those emails... I can smell the desperation from here. You can maybe get away with one customer-relations-type email "hey, sorry to hear you didn't like the experience, let me know if there's anything we can do to improve!" And then you just gotta leave it alone. You can't make friends with everyone, and you certainly can't argue your way into being friends with everyone.

    redcalcium,

    Just for some perspective, if you want to know how little reach the fedi post with the link to this blog post got: the first post in this thread already has more likes and boosts after less than a hour since posting it than my blog post ever did that he felt the need to confront me over.

    The author is probably weren’t aware that their blog post get a huge engagement on hacker news and the ceo got a lot of flak there, which was probably why he felt the need to reach out and “correct” the author.

    redcalcium,

    As a concept, paid search engines is actually a good idea. It incentivize the company to produce great result so their users won’t search over and over (which reduce their profit), unlike google which incentivized to reduce search quality so their users have to search over and over and see more ads (per the article). If it’s not kagi, I hope other paid search engines start to appear in this space. Indexing the web is expensive, and after seeing what happened with google, it’s clear that free ad-suported search engine is not the way to go now.

    jqubed,
    @jqubed@lemmy.world avatar

    There’s an awful lot of things where if the incentives were to keep paying users happy instead of keeping advertisers happy we would see very different results from the service. Unfortunately, for an awful lot of these services people don’t want to pay for them, or at least don’t want to pay what it costs to make them financially viable.

    SnotFlickerman, (edited )
    @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    The high cost of housing is squeezing people all over the globe and we’re seeing a spike in homelessness in first-world countries from USA to Australia, where the affordability of housing is out of control, on top of explosive inflation of food costs.

    It may not be that they “don’t want to pay” but simply not enough people have enough discretionary income to pay enough to make the business financially viable.

    I mean, that’s what happened to Beeper and while I was a very early on their sign up list I decided to never give them any money. When it became clear they weren’t able to keep things going on how much money they were making from paying users: Micigovsky sold to a larger company.

    I think it’s an issue that the services they’re offering actually cost more than the market is actually effectively able to bear and they’re trying to hide that fact with advertising and data sales to cover operating costs.

    More simply put: Consumers don’t actually have enough money anymore to be able to support a business, and businesses essentially now must rely on other businesses as customers to be able to functionally exist financially. Only other businesses have the finances to support new business.

    AVincentInSpace,

    Searx exists and is decentralized although as for the quality of results that’s up in the air

    z3rOR0ne,
    @z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml avatar

    I’m pretty sure Duckduckgo proxies Bing, not Google.

    BaroqueInMind,

    DDG proxies Bing you silly fuck

    Use SearXNG

    demonsword,
    @demonsword@lemmy.world avatar

    No one cares Google sucks now

    It used to help me greatly at my job (software development). I’m using mostly DDG as a replacement but it just isn’t even close to what Google used to be years ago.

    frezik,

    No one cares Google sucks now. If you do, go get a fucking life.

    Dude, no. Having good search results matter. People are directly influenced by what comes out at the top of search results. Finding a good reference makes the difference between a well sourced claim and just talking out of your ass. It absolutely has an effect on public discourse at large.

    It doesn’t have to be Google, but Google was so good at it for so long that we’re now kinda lost.

    BaroqueInMind,

    Google was so good at it for so long that we’re now kinda lost.

    Then either adapt or die. Move on to another search engine, host your own, use an AI LLM or go to the fucking library.

    Complaining to a corporation doesn’t do shit unless you affect their bottom line. And so far all these articles and message boards with losers complaining about this have done nothing to slow it down or reverse Google’s trajectory.

    frezik,

    You say that because it’s clear you have no fucking clue how difficult a problem this is. This isn’t something you can do overnight, and I’m not even sure a self-hosted solution is possible.

    BaroqueInMind,

    I’m not even sure a self-hosted solution is possible.

    You say that, but it’s clear you have no fucking clue how easy a solution is.

    yacy.net

    Commercial options:

    solr.apache.org

    www.meilisearch.com

    frezik,

    No, you just haven’t thought through the implications more than a single step.

    The real trick is SEO. These systems will be gamed. Google used to handle this by using its monopoly on search to enforce rules. It wasn’t perfect, but it kept the worst spam from being in the top five results for the most part. Doing this self-hosted would mean a million users having to agree to do the same thing to punish spam results, and that does not work.

    And then there’s the problem of crawling and storing the entire web. Doing this for specific topics is doable. The entire web is not. Not for a home user with limited budget. YaCy’s P2P mode might be a way around that, but it’s also not really “self-hosted” anymore.

    Microsoft dumped tons of money into making the second best search engine, and it’s a bit of a joke. This is not an easy problem.

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