Newsletter: Google has deposed Prabhakar Raghavan, the Man Who Killed Google Search, in a desperate move to reverse a years-long decline in revenue growth, product stagnation, and a categorical failure to make any impact with their AI products. www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/ - ThreadSky

edzitron.com • 155 days ago

Newsletter: Google has deposed Prabhakar Raghavan, the Man Who Killed Google Search, in a desperate move to reverse a years-long decline in revenue growth, product stagnation, and a categorical failure to make any impact with their AI products.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/

Comments

jasongrvin.bsky.social•155 days ago

Good thing they're investing in mini nuclear power plants for AI. That'll turn things around for sure.

boboinparadise.bsky.social•155 days ago

Over promise, under deliver?

dfs4114.bsky.social•155 days ago

They noticed all those "-noai" search requests piling up, huh?

katekilla.bsky.social•155 days ago

Would it even be possible to launch and sustain a non-profit search engine that actually just provides search results? No ads, no AI, no cryptic rules about how to gain the system? It would be such a beautiful thing.

glinden.bsky.social•155 days ago

It's quite expensive to build a search engine. Microsoft Bing, for example, apparently has cost $100B over the decades despite its meager market share. They certainly could try to grab share by reducing ads and making it better than Google, but they haven't.
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-has-invested-dollar100-billion-in-bing-says-satya-nadella-during-google-antitrust-trial

katekilla.bsky.social•155 days ago

I’ve been using duck duck go, which feels better. But I hate the idea that google will fall but be replaced by something just as shitty or even shittier.

glinden.bsky.social•155 days ago

Duck Duck Go is great, privacy preserving, and has fewer ads. The quality of the results seems to me as good as Google nowadays. I use DuckDuckGo too and recommend it too!

katekilla.bsky.social•155 days ago

Definitely trying to normalize its use. My teenager teases me about it.

guyt.bsky.social•155 days ago

DuckDuckGo is much worse for finding texts in languages other than English, unfortunately.

kimshum.bsky.social•155 days ago

Iirc, you mentioned that your earlier piece on Raghavan was widely shared. Do you think the attention you brought to him played a part in this?

edzitron.com•155 days ago

I'm honestly not sure. I've had nobody at google tell me directly anything about him, and have no information about his reaction. But google put out a statement trying to argue with my piece. He's read it, or at least had it summarised for him. Probably not a fan of it

porter79.bsky.social•155 days ago

Bravo on the good work. I've been listening to your podcast about the Google trial and enjoying it immensely.

vonneudeck.com•155 days ago

Viel Feind, viel Ehr’!

You can be proud.

kimshum.bsky.social•155 days ago

Indeed. It's a great, damning piece. It feels unlikely that his subsequent ouster is completely unrelated.

Which makes me wonder if actual hard-hitting journalism - not the fawning sycophancy of the tech press - could actually change things.

gt-alex.bsky.social•154 days ago

Well Gamers Nexus are definitely shaking a few things out there, so yes. It's probably why billionaires buy media and turn them into lazy clones.

jauntywk.bsky.social•154 days ago

Found https://youtu.be/6VjYFdHMC3A , is there more?

gt-alex.bsky.social•154 days ago

Oh there's a bunch, sometimes it's just them figuring out shit through testing and exposing it, sometimes it's more advanced investigations.

mkrebs.bsky.social•155 days ago

You must be related to Mary Hartman! 😁

kimshum.bsky.social•155 days ago

Better than Alf! AKA Gordon Shumway. 😆

trombonehero.bsky.social•154 days ago

“or at least had it summarized for him” 😂

jamiesharp.bsky.social•155 days ago

Good, maybe Google will heal!

aaaac.bsky.social•155 days ago

Great reporting! Have you seen anything to the services being broken up by the anti-trust lawsuit? I’m sort of worried the actually useful things out of Google (email, docs) are gonna get destroyed by PE if it’s split into baby bells.

vonneudeck.com•155 days ago

Usually those get better once broken off. If there is money in them and there is.

aaaac.bsky.social•155 days ago

It’s a question for an expert, my view is limited. what makes them good is that since they are free, their ubiquity is making their competitors also free. Assuming PE, they will quickly cease to be free except as an entry way to a monetized system. Which in turn might poison its competitors.

vonneudeck.com•155 days ago

That is already the case now.

aaaac.bsky.social•155 days ago

Oh, a smarter concern is probably the massive library of Alexandria archive loss a degrading of storage in Google docs or Gmail would cause.

vonneudeck.com•155 days ago

I’m pretty sure the size of each product is big enough to mostly avoid that.
I would not be worried about existing products. Only future ones, if at all.

foundationsofthedigitalstate.com•155 days ago

Shingy! happy days

writeups.org•155 days ago

As a search-dependent website, I'm happy to hear this.

But so much damage has been done. And I don't see most people returning to searching the free-and-open-Internet now they're all on five mega-platforms.

julianday.ca•155 days ago

I think a lot about how Google is for people whose instinct is to open a web browser and how there's a whole generation trained to open apps instead.

benf.org•155 days ago

They've kind of got around that by hijacking the "search your phone" dialog on Android.....

(Say one thing for them, android was a genius move which probably bought them 10 years)

benderdict.bsky.social•155 days ago

This is a good point.

oranmagal.bsky.social•155 days ago

So Google is getting rid of the person who destroyed the quality of its search engine (yay) and replacing him with some schmuck from McKinsey (🤮)? We just can’t catch a break.

caliredandgreen.bsky.social•155 days ago

Better late than never?

augh3d.bsky.social•155 days ago

lmao get fucked nerd

thanks for your ongoing efforts Ed

edzitron.com•155 days ago

Last week, Prabhakar Raghavan, formerly head of Google Search (among other things), was moved to “Chief Technologist,” a ceremonial title for a man who oversaw the destruction of arguably the most important tech product of all time.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/

duanemoody.qwiffer.com•155 days ago

When is he being moved to the ceremonial title for "visa revoked and moving back to Hyderabad"

edzitron.com•155 days ago

Raghavan started at Google as Head of Ads at a time when revenue growth had collapsed, and once he took over search in 2020, revenue surged dramatically - exactly as Google Search became bloated full of ads and SEO spam.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/

edzitron.com•155 days ago

Raghavan’s desperate and reckless moves - making Google Search’s results worse, making ads harder to differentiate from results, and so on - worked for a time, but growth collapsed again in 2023, recovered a little, and has already started to trend down.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/

edzitron.com•155 days ago

Raghavan’s “success” with Google Search gave him power over Ads, Shopping, Maps, and eventually Gemini - which I believe led to his downfall, along with Google’s ridiculous AI search results. Even he, the master of bastards, couldn’t make AI make money.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/

edzitron.com•155 days ago

Moving on from Raghavan shows that Google is desperate, that their upcoming earnings will be grim, that their search and ads monopolies are collapsing, and they have no big ideas to find growth. Raghavan failed, and Google doesn't know what to do next.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/

edzitron.com•155 days ago

There is a case to be made that we are watching the slow, painful collapse of Google — a company best known for a wonderful product it chose to ruin, helmed by a management consultant that has, for the most part, overseen the decay of its brand.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/

eltopo71.com•155 days ago

I would suggest "make your product suck less"... google search being functional is what killed the other search engines. Making people search multiple times for the same thing with slightly tweaked wording because the search results are trash is NOT "engagement".

hengymrohebwlad.bsky.social•155 days ago

Interesting to see Maps mentioned there. I was a huge fan of Maps right from when it started. But in the last couple of years it's become almost unusable. Too many pop-outs full of ads/reviews, hard to switch between useful views.

Sounds like there's a similar explanation to the mess with search.

edzitron.com•155 days ago

Yeah turns out there's a guy to blame

ryanhumphrey.bsky.social•155 days ago

Has anyone managed to make AI make money? And by that I specifically mean profits from AI output, not Nvidia selling hardware.

edzitron.com•155 days ago

some startups have but to my knowledge none of the model companies. Midjourney is apparently profitable but i have no idea how

dlbowman76.com•155 days ago

There's a non-zero possibility that the McKinsey droids are going to manage to kill a blue-chip company that average people actually liked.

aaronsofaer.bsky.social•155 days ago

an act far too long in coming, but sickos haha yes dot png regardless, I'll take whatever I can get nowadays.

johnnyyukon.bsky.social•155 days ago

This newsletter was shockingly short - are you ok? (good stuff though)

nevillemorley.bsky.social•155 days ago

Fascinating as ever, but I do wish you'd either passed on the throwaway Decline of the Roman Empire line, or made more of it...

edzitron.com•155 days ago

I'll do what I want the thing's free

edzitron.com•155 days ago

But also believe me if things fall apart further I'll be going down that path

nevillemorley.bsky.social•155 days ago

Fair enough, but think of all the dreadful people who like Roman analogies.

hairychris.bsky.social•155 days ago

Lol

Lmao, even

nwbw.bsky.social•155 days ago

If this article doesn't have "the smile" between every paragraph, I'll be upset, nay, chagrined even.

aiabx.bsky.social•155 days ago

So will their successor lean even harder into AI? That's a big investment that needs to be monetized.

lizardky.bsky.social•153 days ago

We really need different words for "removed from power" and "questioned under oath by lawyers".

franciscoluz.bsky.social•155 days ago

o dia mais feliz da vida de pesquisadora da @priscilavanti.bsky.social

saldemar.bsky.social•155 days ago

Shingy could have been a net positive if he'd slowly evolved into one of those overly kawaii mascots, like an AOL Gritty

queengwenevere.bsky.social•155 days ago

Goodness, they really ARE flailing around now, aren’t they

Honestly they should revert to whatever they had going on back when everything worked. They had good products! That were genuinely useful! They could do that again!

kankato.bsky.social•155 days ago

Oh thank god fuck that guy

rmacdca.bsky.social•155 days ago

Google Search is like watching the wrong color of paint dry.

origamimarie.bsky.social•154 days ago

Hmm this is a decent color of green.

No wait, it's changing.

Nononono go back this is the wrong direction.

Oh I think I can see where this is going and it's not great.

Yep. It's dry. And somehow a plausible color of green has turned to 💩

radruss.bsky.social•154 days ago

Very excited to watch this change nothing.

box.beesky.social•155 days ago

really good article!

karlrolson.com•155 days ago

Google sticking Gemini under DeepMind might particularly bad as AI research divisions have a hard time productizing their work. Usually, the AI project needs to be led by/consumed by something more forward facing, not the reverse.

jkosmicki.bsky.social•155 days ago

They shot Google Reader in the back of the head because they couldn't figure out how to monetize it enough, even though many users would gladly have paid a fee to keep it alive

begrudginglyyeast.bsky.social•155 days ago

Does this mean they might shutter Gemini? That would be wonderful news!

mewmew13.bsky.social•155 days ago

can it be fixed?

nulljaeger.bsky.social•155 days ago

Oh thank god- Removing/reversing the use of AI is the main thing I would like from google right now. It doesn't make them money and no one is using google /because/ it has AI since everyone else is embracing it too (🤮)
Seems like a good decision to me

ericaragon.bsky.social•155 days ago

https://udm14.com/
AI-free google

begrudginglyyeast.bsky.social•155 days ago

I cannot help but wonder who operates that website and what they are getting for the information of everyone who searches through it rather than appending it themselves in their own browsers

ericaragon.bsky.social•155 days ago

If privacy concerns you, probably shouldn't use Google at all, then.
I use DuckDuck but if i want to see what Google looked like in the before time, i use the udm-14 bookmark

ericaragon.bsky.social•155 days ago

Also a little tip, add
-sponsored
to any Google search and voila

ericaragon.bsky.social•155 days ago

But here's other ways you can customize your Google search yourself.
https://tenbluelinks.org/

wolfsteak.bsky.social•155 days ago

that god finally. Can't believe one dude made searching anything worse

woolie.meowmeow.city•155 days ago

Thank you for the memory of Shingy. It brought brightness to my day, a glimpse of a simpler time.

dayv.wtf•155 days ago

I worked for AOL for years, and while I can't tell you what Shingy produced other than conference appearances and perhaps an unusual odor, I can tell you that every time we had a layoff, I rushed to the employee database to see if he was still employed as our digital prophet and he was *essential*.

dayv.wtf•155 days ago

It was a really good way to not take the company's "cost-cutting" goals too seriously.

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