The Man That Destroyed Google Search

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2:12Better Offline. And in the next two episodes, I'm going to tell you the names of some of the people responsible for destroying the internet. And I'm going to start on February 5th, 2019. when Ben Gomes, Google's former head of search, well, he had a problem. Jerry Dishler, then the VP and GM of ads at Google, and Shiv Van Karterman, then the VP of engineering search and ads on Google properties, had called something called a code yellow for search revenue due to, and I quote emails that came out as part of Google's anti-trust hearing, steady weakness in the daily numbers and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind in metrics that, kind of unclear.

2:53For those unfamiliar with Google's internal kind of Scientology-esque jargon, which means most people, let me explain. A code yellow isn't a terrible need to piss, or some sort of crisis of moderate severity. The yellow, according to Stephen Levy's tell-all book about Google, refers to, and I promise this is not a joke, the color of a tank top that a former VP of engineering called Wayne Rosling used to wear during his time at the company. It's essentially the equivalent of a DEFCON 1, and activates, as Levy explained, a war room-like situation where workers are pulled from their desks and into a conference room where they tackle the problem as a top priority.

3:30Any other projects or concerns are sidelined. And independently, I've heard there are other colors, like purple. I'm not going to get into that though, it's quite boring and irrelevant to this situation. In emails released as part of the Department of Justice's antitrust case against Google, as I previously mentioned, Dishler laid out several contributing factors. Search query growth was significantly behind forecast, the timing of revenue launches was significantly behind, and he had this vague worry that several advertiser-specific and sector weaknesses existed in search. Now I want to cover something, because I've messed up, and I really want to be clear about this.

4:07I've previously and erroneously referred to the code yellow as something that Gomes raised as a means of calling attention to the proximity of Google's ad site getting a little too close to search. I'm afraid the truth is extremely depressing and so much grimmer. The code yellow was actually the rumble of the goddamn rot economy, with Google's revenue arm sounding the alarm that its golden goose wasn't laying enough eggs. Gomes, a Googler of 19 years that basically built the foundation of modern search engines, should go down as one of the few people in tech that actually fought for an actual principle, and he was destroyed by a guy called Prabhakar Raghavan, a computer scientist class traitor that sided with the management consultancy sect.

4:49More confusingly, one of their problems was that there was insufficient growth in queries, as in the amount of things that people were asking Google. It's a bit like if Ford decided that things were going poorly because their drivers weren't putting enough goddamn miles on their trucks. This whole story has personally upset me, and I think you're going to hear that in this, but going through these emails is just very depressing. Anyway, a few days beforehand on February 1st, 2019, Kristen Gill, then Google's VP business finance officer, had emailed Shashi Thakur, then Google's VP of engineering, Search and Discover, saying that the ads team had been considering a code yellow to close the search gap it was seeing.

5:35Vaguely referring to how critical that growth was to an unnamed company plan. To be clear, this email was in response to Thakur stating that there is nothing that the search team could do to operate at the fidelity of growth that the ads department had demanded. Shashi forwarded the email to Gomes, asking if there's any way to discussed this with Sundar Pashai, Google's CEO, and declared that there was no way he would sign up for a high-fidelity business metric for daily active users on search. Thacker also said something that I've been thinking about constantly since I read these emails, that there was a good reason that Google's founders separated search from ads.

6:14I want you to remember that line for later. A day later, on February 2nd, 2019, Thacker and Gomes shared their anxieties with Nick Fox, a vice president of Search and Google Assistant, entering a multiple day-long debate about Google's sudden lust for growth. This thread is a dark window into the world of growth-focused tech, where Thacker listed the multiple points of disconnection between ads and Search, discussing how the Search team wasn't able to finally optimize engagement on Google without hacking it, a term that means effectively tricking users into spending more time on a site, and that doing so would lead them to, and I quote, In one email, Fox adds that there was a pretty big disconnect between what finance and ads wants, and what Search was doing.

7:03Every part of this story pisses me off so much. When Gomes pushed back on the multiple requests for growth, Fox added that all three of them were responsible for search and that search was, and again I quote, the revenue engine of the company and that bartering with the ads and finance teams was now potentially the new reality of their jobs. On February 6th, 2019, Gomes said that he believed that search was getting too close to the money and ended his email by saying that he was concerned that growth is all that Google was thinking about. On March 22nd, 2019, Google VP of Product Management, Darshan Kantak, would declare the end of the code yellow.

7:43The thread mostly consisted of congratulatory emails, until Gomes made the mistake of responding congratulating everyone, saying that the plans architected as part of the code yellow would do well throughout the year. Enter Prabhakar Raghavan, then Google's head of ads and the true mastermind behind the code yellow, who would respond curtly, saying that the current revenue targets were addressed by heroic RPM engineering and that the core query softness continued without mitigation. A very clunky way of saying that despite these changes, query growth was not happening at the rate he needed it to.

8:18A day later, Gomes emailed Fox and Thaker an email he intended to send to Raghavan. He led by saying that he was annoyed both personally and on behalf of the search team. In this very long email, he explained in arduous detail how one might increase engagement with Google search, but specifically added that they could increase queries quite easily in the short term, but only in user negative ways, like turning off spell correction or ranking improvements or placing refinements, effectively labels, all over the page, adding that it was possible that there are trade-offs here between the different kinds of user negativity caused by engagement hacking, and that he was deeply, deeply uncomfortable with this.

8:59He also added that this was the reason he didn't believe that queries as in the amount of the things with people searching on google were a good metric to measure search and that the best defense against the weaknesses of queries was to create compelling user experiences that make users want to come back crazy idea there what if the product was good not not good enough for probaka so a little bit of history about google here they regularly throughout the year do core updates to search these are updates that change the algorithm that say, okay, we're going to suppress this kind of thing. We're going to elevate this kind of thing.

9:35And they are actually the reason that search changes. It's why certain sites suddenly disappear or reappear. It's why sites get a ton of traffic. Some don't get any and so on and so forth. But they do a lot of them. The one that's really interesting, I'm a little bastard and I went and looked through pretty much the last decade of these. The one that stood out to me was the March 2019 core update to search, which happened about a week before the end of the code yellow, meaning that it's very likely that this was a result of Prabaka's bullshit. So this was expected to be one of the largest updates to search in a very long time, and I'm quoting Search Engine Journal there.

10:13Yet when it launched, many found that the update mostly rolled back changes, and traffic was increasing to sites that had been suppressed by previous updates, like Google Search's Penguin update from 2012, that specifically targeted spammy search results. There were others that were seeing traffic as well from an update that happened on the 1st of August 2018. That was a few months after Gomes became head of search. While I'm guessing here, I really don't know. I do not work for Google. I do not have friends there. I think the timing of the March 2019 core update, along with the traffic increases to previously suppressed sites that 100 % were spammy SEO nonsense, I think these suggest that Google's response to the code yellow was to roll back changes that were made to maintain the quality of search A few months later in May 2019 Google would roll out a redesign of how ads were shown on Google search Specifically on mobile replacing the bright green ad label and URL color on ads with a tiny little bolded black note that said ad in the smallest font you could possibly put there with the link looking otherwise identical to a regular search link I guess that's how they managed to start hitting their numbers, huh?

11:26And then in January 2020, Google would bring this change to desktop, and The Verge's John Porter would suggest that it made Google's ads look just like search results now. Awesome. Five months later, a little over a year after the Code Yellow situation, Google would make Prabhakar Raghavan the head of Google Search, with Jerry Dishler taking his place as the head of ads. After nearly 20 years of building Google Search, Gomes would be relegated to the SVP of education at Google. Gomes, who was a critical part of the original team that made Google Search work, who has been credited with establishing the culture of the world's largest and most important search engine, was chased out by a growth-hungry managerial type.

12:11Several of them, actually, led by Prabhakar Rakhavan, a management consultant wearing an engineer costume. As a side note, by the way, I use the term management consultant there as a pejorative. While he exhibits all the same bean-counting, morally unguided behaviors of a management consultant, from what I can tell, Raghavan has never actually worked in that particular sector of the economy. But you know who has? Sandar Pishai, the CEO of Google, who previously worked at McKinsey, arguably the most morally abhorrent company that's ever existed, having played roles both in the 2008 financial crisis, where it encouraged banks to load up on debt and flawed mortgage-backed securities, and the ongoing opioid crisis, where it effectively advised Purdue Pharma on how to growth hack sales of OxyContin, an extremely addictive painkiller.

12:58McKinsey has paid nearly$1 billion over several settlements due to its work with Purdue. But I'm getting sidetracked. But one last point. McKinsey is actively anti-labor. When a company brings in a McKinsey consultant, they're often there to advise on how to cut costs, which inevitably means layoffs and outsourcing. McKinsey is to the middle class what flesh-eating bacteria is to your skin.

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15:21See website for more. But back to the emails, which are a stark example of the monstrous, disgusting rot economy. the growth at all cost mindset that's dominating the tech ecosystem. And if you take one thing away from this episode, I want it to be the name Prabhakar Raghavan, and an understanding that there are people responsible for the current state of the internet. These emails, which I really encourage you to look up, and if you go to wheresyoured.at, you'll be able to see a newsletter that has links to them. Well, these emails tell a dramatic story about how Google's finance and advertising teams, led by Raghavan with the blessing of CEO Sundar Pichai, the McKinsey guy, actively worked to make Google worse to make the company more money.

16:08This is exactly what I mean when I talk about the economy, an illogical, product-destroying mindset that turns products you love into torturous, frustrating quasi-tools that require you to fight the company to get the thing you want. Ben Gomes was instrumental in making search work, both as a product and a business. He joined the company in 1999, a time long before Google established dominance in the field, and the same year when Larry Page and Sergey Brin tried to sell the company to Excite for$1 million, only to walk away after Vinod Kostler, an Excite investor and co-founder of some microsystems that's now a VC who tried to stop people going to a beach in Half Moon Bay.

16:47Well, he tried to lowball them with a$750 ,000 offer, also known as a 100-square-foot apartment in San Francisco. In an interview with Fast Company's Harry McCracken from 2018, Gomes framed Google's challenge as taking the page-rank algorithm from one machine to a whole bunch of machines. And they weren't very good machines at the time. Despite his impact and tenure, Gomes had only been made head of search in the middle of 2018, after John Guillandria moved to Apple to work on its machine learning and AR strategy. gomes had been described as google's search czar beloved for his ability to communicate across google's many quite decentralized departments every single article i've read about gomes and his tenure at google spoke of a man deeply ingrained in the foundation of one of the most important technologies ever made a man who had dedicated decades to maintaining a product with a and i quote gomes here guiding light of serving the user and using technology to do that and when finally given the keys to the kingdom the ability to elevate google search even further he was rat fucked by a series of rotten careerists trying to please wall street led by probakar ragavan do you want to know what probakar ragavan's old job was what probakar ragavan the new head of google search the guy that ran google search that runs google search right now that is running google search into the goddamn ground do you want to know what his job was his job before google He was the head of search for goddamn Yahoo from 2005 through 2012.

18:23When he joined the company, when Prabhakar Raghavan took over Yahoo Search, they held a 30.4 % market share, not far from Google's own 36.9%, and miles ahead of the 15.7 % that Microsoft's MSN Search had. By May 2012, Yahoo was down to just 13.4 % and had shrunk for the previous nine consecutive months and was being beaten by even the newly released Bing. That same year, Yahoo had the largest layoffs in its corporate history, shedding 2 ,000 employees, or 14 % of its overall workforce. The man who deposed Ben Gomes, someone who worked on Google search from its very beginnings, was so shit at his job that in 2009, Yahoo effectively threw in the towel on its own search tech, instead choosing to license Bing's engine in a 10-year deal.

19:14If we take a long view of things, this likely precipitated the overall decline of the company, which went from being worth$125 billion at the peak of the dot-com boom to being sold to Verizon for$4.8 billion in 2017, which is roughly a 3 ,000-square-foot apartment in San Francisco. With Search no longer a priority and making less money for the company, Yahoo decided to pivot into Web 2.0 and original content, making some bets that paid off, but far, far too many that did not. It spent$1.1 billion on Tumblr in 2013, only for Verizon to sell it for just$3 million in 2019. It bought Zimbra in 2007 ostensibly to complete with the new Google Apps productivity suite, only to sell it for a reported fraction of the original purchase price to VMware a few years later.

20:03That's not his fault. but nevertheless yahoo was a company without a mission a purpose or an objective nobody and i'll speculate even those leading the company really knew what it was or what it did anyway just a big shout out right now to kara swisher who referred to probakar as well respected when he moved from yahoo to google you absolutely nailed it kara bang up job in an interview with zdnet's dan Farber from 2005, Raghavan spoke of his intent to align the commercial incentives of a billion content providers with social good intent while at Yahoo, and his eagerness to inspire the audience to give more data.

20:43What? Anyway, before that, it's actually hard to find out exactly what Raghavan did. Though according to ZDNet, he spent 14 years doing search and data mining research at IBM. in april 2011 the guardian ran an interview with ragavan that called him yahoo's secret weapon describing his plan to make rigorous scientific research and practice to inform yahoo's business from email to advertising and how under then ceo carol bartz the focus had shifted to the direct development of new products it speaks of ragavan's scientific approach and his steady process-based logic to innovation that is very different to the common perception that ideas and development are more about luck and spontaneity.

21:28A sentence that I'm only reading to you because I really need you to hear how stupid it sounds and how specious some of the tech press used to be. Frankly, this entire article is ridiculous, so utterly vacuous that I'm actually astonished. I don't want to name the reporter. I feel bad. What about Raghavan's career made this feel right? how has nobody connected these dots before i have a day job i run a pr firm i am a blogger with a podcast and and i'm the one who said yeah okay dracula is now the ceo of the blood bank nobody saw this nobody saw this at the time i i just feel a bit crazy i feel a bit crazy but to be clear this was something written several years after yahoo had licensed its search technology to Microsoft.

22:14In a financial deal that the next CEO, Marissa Mayer, who replaced Bartz, was still angry about for years, Raghavan's reign as what ZDNet referred to as the search master was one so successful that it ended up being replaced by a search engine that not a single person in the world enjoys saying out loud. The Guardian article ran exactly one year before dramatic layoffs at Yahoo that involved firing entire divisions worth of people and four months before Carol Bartz would be fired by telephone by then-chairman Roy Bostock. Her replacement, Scott Thompson, who previously served as president of PayPal, would last a whole five months in a row before he was replaced by former Google executive Marissa Mayer, in part because it emerged he lied on his resume about having a computer science degree.

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24:31or visit amerifactors.com. Bartz joined Yahoo in 2009, so about four years into Robocard's brain of terror, I guess. And she joined in the aftermath of its previous CEO, Jerry Yang, refusing to sell the company to Microsoft for$45 billion. In her first year, she laid off hundreds of people and struck a deal that I've mentioned before to power Yahoo's search using Microsoft's Bing search engine tech, with Microsoft paying Yahoo 88 % of the revenue it gained from searches, a deal that made Yahoo a couple hundred million dollars for handing over the keys and the tech to its most high-traffic platform.

25:10As I previously stated, when Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo's secret weapon, was doing his work, Yahoo's search was so valuable that it was replaced by Bing. Its sole value, in fact. I mean, maybe I'm being a little unfair, but there's a way of looking at this. You could say that Yahoo's entire value at the end of his career was driven by nostalgia and association with days before he worked there. Anyway, thanks to the state of modern search, it's actually very, very difficult to find much about Raghavan's history. It took me hours of digging through Google, and at one point being, embarrassingly, to find three or four articles that went into any depth about him.

25:49But from what I've gleaned, his expertise lies primarily in failing upwards, ascending through the ranks of technology, on the momentum from the explosions he's caused. In a Wired interview from 2021, glad handler Stephen Levy said Raghavan isn't the CEO of Google, he just runs the place, and described his addition to the company as a move from research to management. While Levy calls him a world-class computer scientist who has authored definitive text in the field, which is true, he also describes Raghavan as choosing a management track, which definitely tracks with everything I've found out about him.

26:22Raghavan proudly declares that Google's third-party ad tech plays a critical role in keeping journalism alive in a really shitty answer to a question that was also made at a time when he was aggressively incentivizing search engine-optimized content and a year after he deposed someone who actually gave a shit about search. Under Raghavan, Google has become less reliable and is dominated by search engine optimization and just outright spam. And I've said this before, but look, we complain about the state of Twitter under Elon Musk, and justifiably, he's a vile anti-Semite racist bigot. We all know this.

26:57It's fully true. We can say it a million times. However, I'd argue that Raghavan, by extension, Sundar Pashai, deserve 100 times more criticism. They've done unfathomable damage to society. You really can't fix the damage they've been doing and the damage they'll continue to do, especially as we go into an election. Raghavan and his cronies worked to oust Ben Gomes, a man who dedicated a good portion of his life to making the world's information more accessible, in the process burning the Library of Alexandria to the goddamn ground so that Sundar Pichai could make more than $200 million a year.