Wanna listen to this story instead? Check out this week's Better Offline podcast, "The Man That Destroyed Google Search," available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it. The story begins

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

MetaFilter thread: https://www.metafilter.com/203456/The-core-query-softness-continues-without-mitigation

  • rigatti@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

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

    • residentmarchant@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      8 months ago

      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@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        1·
        8 months ago

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

        • frunch@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          8 months ago

          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@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      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.