The Man Who Killed Google Search - eviltoast

Edward Zitron has been reading all of google’s internal emails that have been released as evidence in the DOJ’s antitrust case against google.

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.

HackerNews thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976

MetaFilter thread: https://www.metafilter.com/203456/The-core-query-softness-continues-without-mitigation

  • This is fine🔥🐶☕🔥@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Sundar Pichai

    Satya Nadella

    Shantanu Narayen (CEO of Adobe since 2008)

    Tech companies with Indian CEOs have defined and refined rent-seeking over innovations.

    Unlike Brin, Page, Zuckerberg, Gates who had interest in technology and the product, these are just fucking yes men who exist to please the board by trying to keep the line going up, as long as they’re not required to take risks themselves.

    They’ll buy competition, give shit pay to employees, and cut costs even if that harns the company in the long run.

    Fuck them.

    • prowling4973@programming.dev
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      8 months ago

      Satya Nadella turned MS around after the disaster years under Balmer. Your racism is blinding you if you think that he’s a problem - from a product perspective or from profit perspective.

      • sorghum@sh.itjust.works
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        8 months ago

        Not to take up for his point, but windows 10 was in development years before Nadella. The only version of windows totally under his governance has been the disastrous windows 11. So I guess I have him to thank for finally giving me the kick in the pants to fully switch to Linux.

        I guess the point I need to make is that Microsoft was not good before or during Nadella. There have been bright spots, but not enough for me to have then outweigh all the other crap pulled both during and before Nadella.

        • prowling4973@programming.dev
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          8 months ago

          Windows is only a small part of MS.

          Nadella gets a lot of/all the credit for Azure which is the only legit competition to AWS.

          O365 has been great for their adoption too.

          And then there’s all the “free” dev tools like GitHub (acquisition), typescript, vs code etc. which bolsters their image.

          I can’t even imagine ms under Balmer giving away that much shit. Hell, I wanted to build apps for lumia and they wanted to charge me an arm and a leg just to get started. This was at a time when their store didn’t have anything going for itself.

      • This is fine🔥🐶☕🔥@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        They also fired entire QA department and crowdsourced it to paying customers.

        And it’s not my racism. I’m a born and raised Indian who everyday meets people like these. Our culture is fucked up.

    • misc@lemmy.sdf.org
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      8 months ago

      Idk didn’t zuck suppress a lot of war shit to please others ? Sell bad ads ? Bloat his platforms with trackers and ads ? All for profit also there is a really REALLY big reddit thread with all the bad things zuck did .

      • This is fine🔥🐶☕🔥@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I’m not talking about Zuckerberg after 10 years of being a CEO.

        I’m talking about Zuckerberg when he dropped out of college, started Facebook, and actually developed features for his new venture.

        We can hate him for being a piece of shit ghoul that he is, but we can’t deny his technical skills.

      • prole@sh.itjust.works
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        8 months ago

        Are we playing a game where we list the names of greedy fucks who have ruined society? Because I assure you that we’re looking at a ration of 10:1, at least, of white names vs. any other ethnicity. And that’s being extremely generous. It’s all old white dudes.

        Stop fooling yourself. Power is defined by “whiteness,” it’s literally a synonym for systemic power and control. If you’re in a position to negatively affect society in such a way, then you’re white.

        Naming a handful of outliers means nothing. Not to mention that those people have all been furthering the goals of that systemic “white” control structure, regardless of their skin color.

        • misc@lemmy.sdf.org
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          8 months ago

          Ah another racist . Why can’t you people just graso the simple that some people are just assholes and its just a person and not a race thing ?

          • prole@sh.itjust.works
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            8 months ago

            I’m the racist? The fuck lol

            Calling out the person claiming Indian CEOs are greedy because they’re Indian, for being racist is the actual racist.

            Go fuck yourself.

            • SupahRevs@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              I don’t think they claimed they were greedy because they were Indian. I think it is more of a question on why the Indian people who have been successful in tech are implementing the profit motive policies and what overlapping culture we share with India that would lead people to that capitalistic goal of profits over product. Isn’t that something worth exploring? I think it already has led to an educational discussion where one commentor mentioned the history of worker actions in India.

            • Richard@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              Have the few brain cells of yours ever banded together and maybe considered that if you’re conflating “white” with “negative effects for society”, then maybe you are indeed a racist?

              • prole@sh.itjust.works
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                8 months ago

                I didn’t do that, you just did. Try to grasp a little nuance.

                On a systemic level, “white,” is power. Power often means negative, yes.

                In the US, are Italian Americans considered white? Yes. How about Irish? Hard to think of many people whiter than the Irish. I say this as an American of Irish descent.

                And yet, their inclusion in this definition is relatively recent. Up until recently, Irish and Italian people were decidedly not white. And yet, the color of their pale skin…? I don’t understand?

                So clearly, the term (at the systemic level, obviously, I’m not talking about individual racism) is elastic. It is culturally defined in the context of the times.

                At a systemic level, “racism” implies oppression by that power. Oppression against “whiteness” at a systemic level is not possible because there is no power in a position to oppress whites. By definition, they’re at the top.

                I fully expect you to just gloss over everything I said and call me racist again. Maybe someone will read this and think twice about how they view these things.

        • prole@sh.itjust.works
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          8 months ago

          You know what, I just had a great idea… Why don’t we try to actually make this at least somewhat scientific.

          Let’s compile a list of the worst “most evil” corporations on the planet. Your Nestles, your Amazons, your Down Chemicals, your Union Carbides, your Godman Sachs, your Blackwaters, etc. etc. and break down their C-Suite employees by ethnicity.

          Let’s see how unique this concept of greed is to Indians. I would bet my next paycheck that at the very least it would be a white plurality.

        • prole@sh.itjust.works
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          8 months ago

          Do you have any concept of how statistics works? It’s interesting (I mean, maybe but probably not really) that you can name a few greedy Indian tech execs, and act like this is some sort of nationwide or worldwide trend. As if your ability to name three people somehow negates centuries of history of the planet (including India, “your land”) being ravaged by white people for profit at the expense of native populations.

          If you think your ability to name three people is somehow meaningful, why don’t we just take a few minutes on LinkedIn to see who’s running these massive US corporations. If you want to make this a racial thing, let’s see how many of them are old white dudes. Let’s see how many of them ARE LITERALLY RUNNING THE SAME CORPORATIONS YOU REFER TO. But they’ve got one Indian dude in their C-Suite, and for you that’s a smoking gun that this is a problem with their race right?

          Brain broken. Taking you at your word that you’re actually Indian (and that this isn’t some overflow from some ethno-religious, Hindu vs. Muslim bullshit), it’s pretty fucking sad that your mind seems to work this way. Talk about self-loathing.