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
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It was true tho.
This alone was worth the read. I’m not tech-inclined, really. I don’t read articles on tech, follow it, or know much about computer science. However, this article was really well written, and they paint a scathing picture of said ratfucker.
He sounds like a professional fall guy to me; who hired him? I bet THEY were the real ones to blame for what happened.
and if you take one thing away from this newsletter, I want it to be the name Prabhakar Raghavan
Yeah okay, but it’s a really hard name to remember.
What about remembering him as “Raghavan, Nimble Pilferer?”
I wonder if we’ll figure out how to stop the constant reaching for quarterly growth before it causes our civilization to collapse.