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Ed Zitron documents Prabhakar Raghavan, the actual guy who turned Google Search into complete shit
(www.wheresyoured.at)
this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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This is what speaking truth to power is supposed to be. EZ tearing the facade of modern tech is a service to everyone, including people inside the tech industry.
The only gripe I have with this article is that I'm not convinced why the metric of "we want people to query more on Google" should be concerning to me. That just sounds like "we want more people to use our product more", which is a completely reasonable metric for any business, no? In the Better Offline podcast he even says "this sounds paranoid of me but no, Google officially said this" and I'm like... ye, sure? Why would that be scary? If the metric was "userads per minute" or something then ye, that'd be Facebook level fuckery, but...
It's a search engine, so if it's taking you more queries than previously to find what you're looking for, that means the quality of the search results has decreased.
Instead of the search team being able to focus on quality as they had been, they were more or less pushed to sabotage the quality of search in order to increase ad revenue.
That's my understanding, anyway.