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
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.
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
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.
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?".
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?
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.