•  Mii   ( @mii@awful.systems ) 
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    247 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.

  •  V0ldek   ( @V0ldek@awful.systems ) 
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    157 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…

      •  V0ldek   ( @V0ldek@awful.systems ) 
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        77 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.

    • “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)

    • 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.

    • 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).