- Mii ( @mii@awful.systems ) English24•7 months ago
Do you want to know what Prabhakar Raghavan’s old job was? What Prabhakar Raghavan, the new head of Google Search, the guy that has run Google Search into the ground, the guy who is currently destroying search, did before his job at Google?
He was the head of search for Yahoo from 2005 through 2012 […]
Christ on a stick, the fucking lore I’m learning today. I had never heard the name Prabhakar Raghavan before, but it seems like this dude has been the man behind the curtain in my life for a while. I used to use Yahoo before Google in the early 2000s before it became shit, and then I used Google until it became shit. I hope he doesn’t end up applying at DuckDuckGo next season.
- self ( @self@awful.systems ) English18•7 months ago
Prabhakar’s mask falls off and it’s Vlad from Kagi
and then he trips and falls over and we find out Vlad’s just 3 small Peters Thiel in an overcoat
- Akasazh ( @Akasazh@feddit.nl ) English7•7 months ago
Peters Thiel or Peter Thiels?
- Woke Sandwich Fillings ( @pikesley@mastodon.me.uk ) 9•7 months ago
- Akasazh ( @Akasazh@feddit.nl ) English3•7 months ago
Ok Julian. I definately prefer you over Mr. stick btw
- sinedpick ( @sinedpick@awful.systems ) English11•7 months ago
It’s crazy, he co-authored the randomized algorithms textbook for a class I had in grad school. That and the information retrieval book he wrote are probably the two biggest components of his engineer cosplay, even to this day.
- acausal_masochist ( @acausal_masochist@awful.systems ) English7•7 months ago
I’ve been wondering whether “a functional web search” is something that will increasingly become impossible as the death of the web progresses.
even the Orange Site hates this fucking guy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
edit: except dang himself, who posts a multi-paragraph comment complaining about the title then edits it to admit he didn’t actually read the article. Presumably this is the style of comment desired at HN going forward.
- self ( @self@awful.systems ) English19•7 months ago
Edit 2: since there’s no consensus on this I’m just going to reify that fact via the trailing-question-mark trick and call it a day.
Since killing != killed, your comment already shows that the title is misleading.
(That has a beneficial side effect btw: not having my own opinion about a story makes it easier to not moderate according to my own opinion. I still do that, or try my best to, even when I do have an opinion—but it takes more ATP.)
danny, please log the fuck off
- froztbyte ( @froztbyte@awful.systems ) English16•7 months ago
“You see, if I don’t …[pause…massive bong hit]…get involved, right? If I don’t get involved …[pause…walks to table, grabs a keg, slams it in one go]… then I by default can’t be subjected to the problem! [does line of coke off side of now-empty keg] And this way, I can always be perfectly neutral! [coke kicks in] This is how I manage to make HN be so central to everything!”
- o7___o7 ( @o7___o7@awful.systems ) English10•7 months ago
“Tell my wife I said…hello.”
–dang’s last words, probably
* “hello?”
also his name is dang? now
- self ( @self@awful.systems ) English10•7 months ago
my new gimmick for the occasions I have to post on the orange site is seeing how many question marks I can add to my thread titles and comments before I get shadowbanned
- froztbyte ( @froztbyte@awful.systems ) English5•7 months ago
what if … whitespace … and predicate logic…? we could call it
?
🥹👉👈
- jax ( @jax@awful.systems ) English12•7 months ago
trailing-question-marks: the consensus bypassing trick anarchists don’t want you to know?
- sinedpick ( @sinedpick@awful.systems ) English13•7 months ago
The amount of tone-policing in the comments is sickening though.
- Snot Flickerman ( @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) English8•7 months ago
So your average HN thread, then.
- sinedpick ( @sinedpick@awful.systems ) English12•7 months ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40139636
will no one think of the poor baby exec who makes 8 figures? how could they be so mean to him??
stole your comment, so there
- jkrtn ( @jkrtn@lemmy.ml ) English7•7 months ago
Nice. I got some restriction for being too sarcastic about Elon and his sycophants, did dang get you yet? It blocks me from posting for a while if I do several at once. I just quit using the site shortly after that.
they don’t actually want people commenting, apparently, so there’s a throttle
- jkrtn ( @jkrtn@lemmy.ml ) English7•7 months ago
For everyone? That’s idiotic. It’s killed all my desire to engage, because I’ll want to respond to someone, hit the wall, and just leave for several days. Eventually the several days seems to have become forever. I thought that was the point after dang specifically told me to “be respectful.” If it’s for everyone that’s completely idiotic.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. The site is not about having good conversations, but getting youths to risk doing a startup in order to fill Paul’s pockets.
- V0ldek ( @V0ldek@awful.systems ) English15•7 months ago
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…
because (a) it’s trivially growth-hacked by making it suck (b) they did in fact growth-hack it by making it suck, and presumably this was obvious to many involved.
- V0ldek ( @V0ldek@awful.systems ) English7•7 months ago
I guess, but any usage metric can be similarly growth-hacked in my mind. I guess what I’m missing is: is there a more reasonable metric to drive your business, even assuming you’re not a malicious exec and actually care about your service?
Unique calls to the site. If someone has to keep rewording queries, you aren’t giving good results. If someone clicks on the first or second result, you’re doing well. These are just off the top of my head.
- froztbyte ( @froztbyte@awful.systems ) English14•7 months ago
“we want people to query more on Google” should be concerning to me
one reading of it could be “we want people to spend more time on our web properties” with the implied “(and less on anyone else’s)”. and it does, at least in what was observed on google’s actions, bear out over the past few years
(and then also the bit that david said)
- subignition ( @subignition@kbin.social ) 13•7 months ago
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?
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.
- Soyweiser ( @Soyweiser@awful.systems ) English13•7 months ago
Well there are two ways to look at improving software (in this case), either we should improve the effectiveness of the tool to do its primary function. Or we should make it sticky so people get forced to use it no matter what to increase our profits.
In video games it would be if an AAA manager suddenly goes ‘we should become more like mobile/facebook games’.
And as we have seen what happened to google, (isn’t it 20/20) we know what he meant with that. The context is important here.
It has certainly worked, more and more times I notice that I need to add additional words to my searched because it keeps finding stuff I don’t care about, and god forbid if you pick a search term that their internal system can map into a sellable product. (A while back I was searching for something and it kept deciding that one of the words was also related to a drink (even if I didn’t search for that term specifically) so all my results were commercial drink related stuff. You know the thing where google turns a part of the search result bold to show you that was why you got the result).
- o7___o7 ( @o7___o7@awful.systems ) English5•7 months ago
I read it more as “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”
- V0ldek ( @V0ldek@awful.systems ) English11•7 months ago
I’m sorry David, I think you meant to title this:
“Ed Zitron documents Prabhakar Raghavan? The actual guy who turned Google Search into complete shit?”