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.
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.
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?
Unique calls to the site. If someone has to keep rewording queries, you aren’t giving good results. If someone clicks on the first or second result, you’re doing well. These are just off the top of my head.
“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
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.
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).
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.
I like to think that there exists a small god whose portfolio consists of punishing people who use the word “narrative” as a bludgeon. He strongly resembles late 2000’s-era Terry Pratchett and is a dab hand with a lighting bolt.
If only there were specific people making those executive decisions that enshittify everything, we could all try to hold them at least a little bit accountable for it. We could call them “executives” or something.
Alas, corporate growth-at-all-cost policies are merely an emergent property with no one particularly responsible for them at all. It’s not like there’s something as damning as, say, an email thread outlining exactly who made all those shitty decisions.
where without the evil villain Raghavan messing things up,
ah yes, a detailed reading of the post does indeed reveal a narrative element best described as being on par with a story one would tell a child! certainly it has no bearing on the commonly-observed issue seen in many industries of late. oh no, massive rent extraction and industry-wide innovationless gatekeeping is merely an emergent property and is not driven by the choices of any particular individuals, no sir-ee!
It’s a narrative whose connection with reality is hard to discern
If only there were email communications that all but prove the allegations.
One could instead say enshittification is an emergent and often unstoppable force, carried out by whoever happens to be in place at the time.
Yeah sure, and you can keep pissing into the ocean while you’re at it while real people try to fix the problems they perceive.
All roads tend to lead to the same place.
Hopefully that’s a place where no one has to read bizarrely dismissive drive-by comments made by people who have No Fucking Clue about what they’re talking about and lack any kind of intellectual spine.
If only there were email communications that all but prove the allegations.
The allegations are presumably true but that is almost irrelevant. The question is what the world would be like in the opposite situation. The lessons of history suggest it would be pretty much the same world as the one that we got. A big enough pile of money in one place will never be left standing. For the article’s narrative to mean anything, it has to argue otherwise, and it makes no attempt at that.
I know what you mean. Naming names is good imo but I was rather irked by the way the piece seemingly allows for a good, virtuous google under the leadership of benevolent engineers. It’s not how capitalism works, it’s certainly not how public companies work.
What particularly confused me is I don’t recall google search being good in the years leading up to 2019? I assume it was somewhat better probably, but it was well on its way to utter shite.
in vacuum, you could say that if not him, there would be some other manager doing the same, pushed to the top by the same forces. but in this case, we have a dude who destroyed yahoo search for “growth”/short term profit, then when that company basically fell apart in large part due to his motherfuckery, he jumped ship, moved to google, failed up however many times he had to, and did exactly the same thing. you would know that if you read the article
am I missing something or are we talking about the specific policy decision to make the site suck more for clicks? I’m sympathetic to the argument that there are lots of other contributing reasons for google getting worse and that they aren’t really addressed in the article, but the causal link between this one guy and engagement hacking couldn’t be more clear.
I’m also sympathetic to the argument that the real issue is systemic (we all live in capitalism), but again, the topic is the specific policy decision to make the site suck more for clicks. sighing about inevitability in response to a very informative article about that decision isn’t a method of critique, it’s a method of dismissal, and it comes across as rather lazy thinking
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.
Nice. I got some restriction for being too sarcastic about Elon and his sycophants, did dang get you yet? It blocks me from posting for a while if I do several at once. I just quit using the site shortly after that.
For everyone? That’s idiotic. It’s killed all my desire to engage, because I’ll want to respond to someone, hit the wall, and just leave for several days. Eventually the several days seems to have become forever. I thought that was the point after dang specifically told me to “be respectful.” If it’s for everyone that’s completely idiotic.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. The site is not about having good conversations, but getting youths to risk doing a startup in order to fill Paul’s pockets.
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