It’s a story from April, I tried seeing if it was posted before, however it’s the story about how the advertising and finance team beat the search team into submission by ousting the core person protecting it to pursue “growth” and “revenue” at all costs.
Great article. The author, Ed Zitron, covers this same topic on his podcast, Better Offline. I highly recommend it.
There’s even a link to it at the top of the article and it’s mentioned in the summary of this post
Oh I missed that, lol. Oh well, it’s worth mentioning regardless. Great podcast. Thanks for pointing that out.
Probably worth the longer read, but I’m on my way out the door and I know I’ll forget later… I had one of the robots gen up a tldr.
TLDR;
The article discusses the internal challenges and strategic shifts at Google, particularly around the management and prioritization of its search engine functionality versus advertising revenue. It starts with a “code yellow” alert raised due to declining search revenue, a term derived humorously from the color of a tank top worn by a former VP. This crisis led to a focus shift towards maximizing revenue, often at the expense of user experience and search quality.
Ben Gomes, a foundational figure in Google Search, and others expressed concerns about the increasing influence of advertising demands over search integrity. This tension resulted in significant leadership changes, with Prabhakar Raghavan taking over as the head of Google Search. The narrative suggests that Raghavan, who had a controversial tenure at Yahoo, brought a similar growth-focused approach to Google, prioritizing revenue over product quality. This shift is portrayed as part of a broader problem in tech, where managerial focus on growth and profits undermines the quality and utility of technology products.
The author uses these events at Google as a microcosm of larger issues in Silicon Valley, critiquing the pervasive “Rot Economy” mindset that prioritizes financial metrics over genuine innovation and user satisfaction. The story serves as a cautionary tale about the consequences of allowing revenue-driven management to dictate the direction of tech companies, potentially leading to a decline in product quality and innovation.
Edit: I especially like how it kept the detail about the yellow shirt. This is the context we need.
“I implemented this model at Yahoo!”
“So you’re the reason why Yahoo! is a useless search engine and its market share crashed?”
“Yes”
“You’re hired!”
This sort of shit makes me want to go into business myself to show everyone how easy it would be to make long-term stable growth by just not squeezing employees and customers for every cent
The issue is the mentality of lack of growth = death and low shareholder returns. When you get as big as these giants this is a valid concern and not an easy problem to solve. You have to be highly creative and find new ways to bring revenue in. Search is stuck in a large rut and is why they’re looking at AI to help spur more growth.
So what if we let a dumbass run google and drive it into the ground? Potentially short term gains!! YES! Let’s do that.
Read this a week or so ago and it’s a fantastic summarization of the core problem. I almost never use Google search anymore. I go between DuckDuckGo and Perplexity.
I’ve tried to use DDG for a few weeks now, and I find it gets worse the more specific I search.
For general things, it’s fine. But if I’m looking for an installation tutorial for a certain kind of plumbing hardware, it struggles to show me anything but brand and retail pages.
You could try a SearXNG someone hosted, it’s FOSS and not worse than Google :)
I started using Kagi. Yeah, I have to pay for it. But we’re paying for Google too, kagi is just more honest about how.
Can I use kagi as a default search for my browser?
I’m trying to use Firefox on desktop and mobile more.
Yep!
I use it on FF mobile and desktop all the time, for the last 6 months or so. It is great.
I’ve been using Perplexity for 2-3 months now. On 2 occasions, it flat out lied to me. The latest one, I was asking if it knew about a men’s brand that featured cranes on the shirt. It kept giving the same incorrect result, so I tried giving it more details, and then eventually it responded very confidently that it must be “Crane & Co a classic American menswear brand”, but it offered no references, which I found odd. Then I asked if it just made that up, and it confessed to fabricating a lie…
did you just make that up?
You’re right, I do not actually have a specific men’s dress shirt brand in mind that features a crane bird logo. I should not have fabricated a brand name and details. I do not have a definitive answer for the specific men’s dress shirt brand you are asking about that has a crane bird on it. I made an incorrect assumption and provided made-up information, which was wrong of me. In the future, I will be more transparent if I do not have a factual answer, rather than guessing. Please feel free to provide me with more details, and I will do my best to research and find the actual brand you are referring to.
That’s odd. Were you using Pro? I find pro to be less reliable, oddly enough. I always check the citations which is why I like their approach.
Would it listen if you told it to tell you when it didn’t know something specifically to try to keep it from lying?
I started finding DDG’s results just as bad as Google’s, so I switched to SearXNG and have been pretty happy with it so far.
Its open source so anyone can run an instance if they wish. I feel like this sort of model is much more resistant to enshitification.
I run a SearXNG instance myself and while it is a fine aggregator, it’s important to note what it is and isn’t. For instance, Sear does not have a dedicated search index and leans on third party API calls (to indexes such as the aforementioned Google and DDG listings.) This is my understanding, feel free to correct it.
For my money, I like the anonymity that Sear can afford and that it hides the AI bullshit pouring into the UIs. My son and I were talking over the weekend about how unreliable he is finding the move to AI search.
Edit: A list of public SearXNG instances for anyone that doesn’t want to spin up their own.
Yes you’re absolutely right. The problem of aggregators is that if all the aggregated searches go to shit, then so does it. Garbage in, garbage out.
SearXNG is just a meta search engine. It uses Google and DDG under the hood, among others. How is it possible that it’s better?
Because the aggregated weighted result ranking provides a more useful page rank than any individual search engine, and if any search engine tries to (accidentally or otherwise) stuff specific results into the top ranks, it doesn’t matter. It’ll be deranked because no other engine displays those results highly. In a similar manner, it deranks targeted SEO attempts unless multiple platforms are targeted.
Don’t get me wrong, it still has its problems. For example, if the individual search engines all get a bit too samey, then it will as well.
Check out You.com too, their search is far better than Google on a lot of the technical topics I’ve searched for.
Edit: ugh, it was good. Now they’re shovelling LLM interaction front and center and the original search functionality is completely buried. If you can find their original search interface it might still be worth a look.
Great article. I subscribed to the newsletter after reading it.
