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.
Probably worth the longer read, but in 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.
Veedem@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
Odelay42@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
Wojwo@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
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.
Chee_Koala@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You could try a SearXNG someone hosted, it’s FOSS and not worse than Google :)
kambusha@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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…
Veedem@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
Enkers@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
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.
Hominine@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.) 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.
asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world 1 week ago
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?
seaQueue@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Check out You.com too, their search is far better than Google on a lot of the technical topics I’ve searched for.
j4yt33@feddit.de 1 week ago
I’ve been using Startpage and been quite happy with it
daddy32@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Well, but that’s just Google minus some of the dark patterns.
Rozz@lemmy.sdf.org 2 weeks ago
Hello me. Unless I really can’t find a result I’m looking for or I need a map feature. I don’t use google