The specific process by which Google enshittified its search (24 Apr 2024)
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan
All digital businesses have the technical capacity to enshittify: the ability to change the underlying functions of the business from moment to moment and user to user, allowing for the rapid transfer of value between business customers, end users and shareholders:
Which raises an important question: why do companies enshittify at a specific moment, after refraining from enshittifying before? After all, a company always has the potential to benefit by treating its business customers and end users worse, by giving them a worse deal. If you charge more for your product and pay your suppliers less, that leaves more money on the table for your investors.
Of course, it's not that simple. While cheating, price-gouging, and degrading your product can produce gains, these tactics also threaten losses. You might lose customers to a rival, or get punished by a regulator, or face mass resignations from your employees who really believe in your product.
Companies choose not to enshittify their products...until they choose to do so. One theory to explain this is that companies are engaged in a process of continuous assessment, gathering data about their competitive risks, their regulators' mettle, their employees' boldness. When these assessments indicate that the conditions are favorable to enshittification, the CEO walks over to the big "enshittification" lever on the wall and yanks it all the way to MAX.
The Men Who Killed Google Search
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
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.
For those unfamiliar with Google's internal scientology-esque jargon, let me explain. A "code yellow" isn't, as you might think, a crisis of moderate severity. The yellow, according to Steven Levy's tell-all book about Google, refers to — and I promise that I'm not making this up — the color of a tank top that former VP of Engineering Wayne Rosing used to wear during his time at the company. It's essentially the equivalent of 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. Any other projects or concerns are sidelined.
In emails released as part of the Department of Justice's antitrust case against Google, Dischler laid out several contributing factors — search query growth was "significantly behind forecast," the "timing" of revenue launches was significantly behind, and a vague worry that "several advertiser-specific and sector weaknesses" existed in search.
Anyway, a few days beforehand on February 1 2019, Kristen Gil, 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," vaguely 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 ads had demanded.
Shashi forwarded the email to Gomes, asking if there was any way to discuss this with Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, and declaring that there was no way he'd sign up to a "high fidelity" business metric for daily active users on search. Thakur 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.
On February 2, 2019, just one day later, Thakur 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. The thread is a dark window into the world of growth-focused tech, where Thakur listed the multiple points of disconnection between the ads and search teams, discussing how the search team wasn't able to finely optimize engagement on Google without "hacking engagement," a term that means effectively tricking users into spending more time on a site, and that doing so would lead them to "abandon work on efficient journeys." In one email, Fox adds that there was a "pretty big disconnect between what finance and ads want" and what search was doing.
When Gomes pushed back on the multiple requests for growth, Fox added that all three of them were responsible for search, that search was "the revenue engine of the company," and that bartering with the ads and finance teams was 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."
[Ed's Comment: This is only the beginning of the story. Go to the link if you wish to read more.--JR]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 27, @01:40AM (2 children)
Plus Google search despite definitely getting worse, is still better overall than their competitors so they can afford to make their search crappier in search for higher profits.
Yandex is actually better than Google some stuff (certain image searches, certain "within site" searches, search for copyrighted stuff) but still worse overall, Bing and DDG are worse.
Microsoft's track record in search has been so bad. From Windows Explorer search, Teams search, Outlook search to Bing search.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 28, @05:38AM
How does long term thinking shift to short term thinking? My take is that this guy was extra-special, both having a record of failure going in, combined with a key role in undermining and eliminating the most influential long term thinker at the company.
(Score: 2) by SingularityPhoenix on Monday April 29, @02:50PM
"Plus Google search despite definitely getting worse, is still better overall than their competitors "
I disagree. Google isn't better anymore. You have to scroll down half a page to get past the adds to the results. In my experience it struggles to find things unless you have good search terms. It has trouble find any results that aren't adds if your search is too close to advertised products. It used to be that google always had what you were looking for on the first page, now its doom scroll, the adds repeat (how you know you're on the second page), but the results are no longer on topic by page 2.
I mean it used to be that if google couldn't find it, it didn't exist. But I've had to search on another engine recently because google couldn't find it. I was pretty surprised the first time, when it was on the first page of another engine.
The invasion of privacy...google uses everything they can to collect data about you, to target adds: your searches, your browser, your telephone's microphone, your texts. If they can collect it they do. There is a reason they are able to get billions of dollars of add revenue. Their add targeting is 2nd to none.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Barenflimski on Saturday April 27, @02:24AM (4 children)
I enjoyed the days before the internet.
I enjoyed watching and participating in the growth of the trade of information as we developed and monetized the internet.
We've created a monster.
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Saturday April 27, @06:09AM
I still like better the "Tears in the rain" monologue, but yours is not too bad :grin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Saturday April 27, @10:21AM (2 children)
The Internet sucks?! In case you weren't being sarcastic, oh heck no!
The Internet is the biggest accomplishment of the last millennium! It's a monster slaying savior! It's right up there with the Gutenberg Press, which it is slaying. It's also slaying antiquated business models, distribution costs, intellectual property laws, the meatspace daily commute of knowledge workers, snail mail, the telephone monopoly, and repressive governance. And, it slays ignorance. Now, yes, on that last it has enabled the spread of a great deal of ignorant bull, but on balance the knowledge it spreads outweighs that.
Worship no other gods before the Internet! Covet not the old days, they weren't good, they sucked!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mcgrew on Saturday April 27, @03:49PM (1 child)
The only thing good about the days of my youth was that the minimum wage was a living wage. The lack of a living minimum wage is the cause of most of this country's problems; crime, homelessness, the housing crisis...
Back then, a loving parent raised the children. Now that the government has legalized wage theft, kids are raised by corporate child care. It's no wonder to me why there's so much youth mental illness and youth violence.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Freeman on Monday April 29, @03:40PM
I grew up with the PC and internet. I remember a time where the internet was not everywhere (or anywhere really), I remember a time where a Cellphone was a novelty for the rich, and I remember a time where Libraries were the information highway. The information highway can still run through the Library and the Library is still the best place to go for anyone who needs to research, find helpful resources, etc. Especially those who have no clue. Most Libraries, especially Academic Libraries (University Libraries) pay a lot of money for resources that the average person just wouldn't be able and/or want to afford. Not to mention Librarians are usually those geeks in school that liked books. I.E. Smarter than the average bear and are usually very helpful. Your average Public Librarian may or may not be with it, but their heart is usually in the right place.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 4, Insightful) by crafoo on Saturday April 27, @04:59AM (4 children)
very interesting post. it seems to mirror what I've seen in my personal experience with small and large organizations. at some point the 'engine' that built the company's success is infiltrated by marketing, sales, and mid-level mid-wit MBAs that are driven by somewhat arbitrary metrics. these people create a stratified bureaucracy that drives the organization away from engineering and customers and towards short-term sales and marketing metrics. I attribute it to the fact that marketing, sales, and mid-management are better at playing the office politics game and generally better at understanding people and getting what they want in interpersonal relationships. they are soon driving the direction of the company no matter who the CEO is or who is on the board.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 27, @09:51AM
I've been having that trouble at work lately. We're not allowed to order popular products because we're over delivered. So rather than make the extra sales, we're just killing sales so the orders match the budget. It makes no sense other than trying to improve an arbitrary grade that management doesn't even understand.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 28, @02:50AM
I can tell you this:
It's a lot easier to invite someone into a management position than it is to get rid of one.
Just like AOL ( subscriptions ) or renters/roommates.
I've watched dozens of companies fail from poor management / office politics that completely de-motivated the men who were the ones actually keeping the company running.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday April 29, @05:41PM
I'll say it again: Advertising destroys everything it ever touches [soylentnews.org]
Every performance optimization is a grate wait lifted from my shoulders.
(Score: 2) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Monday April 29, @11:48PM
https://bobshea.net/empire_of_the_rising_scum.html [bobshea.net]
Executive summary: no matter what an organization is meant for, when the people whose superpower is getting promoted get in, they take it over and turn it into something that only benefits them.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Saturday April 27, @05:44AM (12 children)
The premise that a company must be constantly growing to be successful is entirely bogus. According to the MBAs the following scenario is a failure: You started a company in 1901 and grown to the point that you employed 5000 employees, and maintained good relations with your community and customers for 123 years, while making a consistent profit, year after year. You've made a profit in spite of depressions, recessions, inflation, deflation. Year after year after year, you've met payroll, paid your taxes, and paid yourself and other investors a modest income. But, you're a failure, because you're not growing at 5, or 10, or 20% every year.
Like my hypothetical company, Google used to be good. Then they started listening to those damned MBAs. Grow, grow, grow, at all costs.
That's so freaking stupid. How many animals in nature continue growing for as long as they live? Not many, and none of them has to meet some growth quota. A catfish might continue growing all of it's life - unless it finds itself in a body of water that won't support continued growth.
Google and some other companies should take a hint from nature.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by c0lo on Saturday April 27, @06:40AM (7 children)
That horse has bolted in the 70'ies, when the currency was floated. If the absolute level of wealth has suddenly lost its value, what do you replace it with? With the accumulation rate, of course, thus "wealth" nowadays is measured in "growth" units (simple, just switch the function value with its first derivative).
FTFY.
Your definition of "not being a failure" is good for a family business. Or for a coop, like the Mondragon corp (ye know? The social-democracy you're so quick to berate as ebil). Yet, the same definition is death for a public company that seeks money on the stock market, competing with others that need capital and are showing a higher rate of growth.
Why do you hate capitalism? :large-grin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Interesting) by weirsbaski on Saturday April 27, @07:23AM (6 children)
The "stock market" isn't some magical creature that lives and breathes on its own, it's the encapsulation of buying and selling stocks and securities, and its behavior is the result of decisions made by the people who agree on buy/sell prices.
It's perfectly reasonable for GP to call out MBAs, as they're well-overrepresented in the group of decision-makers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Saturday April 27, @09:13AM (4 children)
The majority of those people are stock traders, who are interested in having a slice of the ... you guessed it, growth.
Long gone are the times when the majority of stock owners where mainly interested in the dividend.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Insightful) by aafcac on Saturday April 27, @10:24AM (3 children)
That's only because companies are allowed to artificially raise their share prices by buying shares back or buying up their competitors. They could just as easily just issue dividends for whatever money was left over after expenses and company investments are made. A company can issue small dividends indefinitely without needing to grow much.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday April 27, @10:04PM (2 children)
That's what the investors ask for, growth. And they will reward the ones that deliver. To the point in which the publicly traded companies that prefer steady are weaker financially and fall prey to the so-rewarded competition.
If you have your retirement in a pension fund (which is the wise thing to do), you yourself are asking for growth. Because otherwise the currency floating (and the switch to growth as the societal value) will eat away your static retirement savings and you will 100% need to run-just-to-stay-in-place and keep working, until you die.
Mind you, even if you "ask for growth", there's no warranty your pension will be enough for your (economically) inactive phase of your life after retirement, but its guaranteed that if you don't ask for growth, you will die a destitute.
Without growth, you can't have the fast technological progress and improvement in the quality of life that we saw in the last 100-150 years. But, you know, TANSTAAFL. Very likely, we (as the humanity) will need to learn the ways of sustainable growth, but we can't refuse growth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Sunday April 28, @11:41AM (1 child)
Which should happen just by keeping up with inflation. No need to do anything crazy as prices go up with inflation as does the price of other things and as long as your customers can keep paying for it, you're not in any danger from that.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday April 28, @12:18PM
And exactly how do you propose to make this happen?
Like, who establishes what's the optimum level of inflation (thus how much money are fiat into existence) and who enforces the "no growth greater than the inflation rate" rule?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Friday May 03, @02:02AM
But the market is composed of millions of investors, and if the CEO doesn't pursue maximum growth then the board of directors will replace the CEO. And if the board of directors doesn't pursue maximum growth then the shareholders will replace the board of directors. And you might convince 1 investor, or 10, or 10,000 not to do that. But you can't talk the whole market into sanity.
Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, etc... and all of the evil crap they're doing aren't doing it because of a handful of assholes in key positions. Their evil is a symptom, the whole fucking market is the disease.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 27, @09:04AM
And inflation is linked to property price increases (which are also linked to inflation).
People/funds invest in property, and it often goes up till the bubble pops.
So while stuff is getting more and more expensive, if your company's profit stays the same, you and your employee eventually are making less relatively.
Workers in Vietnam are cheaper because the property there hasn't become as expensive as in the US.
What the GDP growth giveth, inflation and property price increases taketh away...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Rich on Saturday April 27, @11:45AM
Trying to grasp the numbers, I imagined the company had a headcount of 5000 in 1944 (wartime production) and then continued for 80 years to grow at the middle percentage you gave, they'd have 10 million employees by now. Which would be five times the largest company today (Walmart) has.
To find that out, I'd had to find a list of the largest companies by headcount. ( https://companiesmarketcap.com/largest-companies-by-number-of-employees/, [companiesmarketcap.com] or https://www.statista.com/statistics/264671/top-50-companies-based-on-number-of-employees/ [statista.com] ) Which in itself is interesting enough, with surprises and mysteries.
Foxconn has become the largest manufacturer worldwide, BYD is already as big as the entire Volkswagen group. Accenture is massive. Concentrix have 440k in one list, don't exist in the other, and it's a bit mystery to find out of what goes on there. They seem to keep the internet clean about what they actually do (there are other names in the corporate mesh, like Convergys or TD Synnex). But, going by their open job positions, they seem to be the biggest driver of enshittification experienced ("Digital Customer Experience") by the average person, mostly being call center scum.
(Score: 2) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Monday April 29, @11:51PM
The author points out that when the apparatchiks take over, the organization's goal, just like a tumor, becomes to grow without limit like a cancer. Not for any purpose, but to give larger empires to the rising scum.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Lester on Wednesday May 01, @03:16PM
That company that has survived 100 years is not failure, but a success.
The problem is that such companies are rare. Most of them are sallowed by big corporations, those small companies that managed to become 500lb gorillas.
That's the tragedy, having a sword doesn't makes you a better farmer, but allows you to live better than the farmer whom you are stealing food
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Snotnose on Saturday April 27, @01:34PM (6 children)
Remember when you could use and and or in your search? Remember when you could use '-' to exclude terms, and '+' to force a term to be in the results? Remember when what you were searching for was one of the first couple results returned?
Those all went away long before 2019.
And they did all this before hoovering up your personal information. I've been using DDG for 10 years or so now, it fails and I have to google something maybe once a month.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday April 27, @03:54PM (4 children)
Yes, and I wish someone would start a new search engine that incorporated them. Ten million search results are worthless if the first ten screens worth don't have what you're looking for.
Good luck finding anything on mcgrew.info with Google.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fab23 on Saturday April 27, @05:33PM
I also had used DuckDuckGo for a long time and a few month ago I tested and then have subscribed to Kagi Search [kagi.com]. I am just a happy customer and not affiliated.
I already had hints for it a while ago, but then the posting Tim Bray: ‘Mourning Google’ [daringfireball.net] from John Gruber pushed me in trying it. Also their blog posting The Age of PageRank is Over [manifesto] [kagi.com] helped.
Right out of the results you can up/down rank (or hide) the sites from the results. Also the "Quick Answer" is useful, which creates a summary of the first few results (e.g. for content from stackoverflow, stackexchange and similar sites). So you may even not have to check the sites of the top results to get what you where looking for. There are some other nice features, like results with customizable rewritten links (aka Redirects [kagi.com]).
What I also like about Kagi is their open communication, like a public Changelog [kagi.com] with links for each ticket out of Kagi Feedback [kagifeedback.org] and their Status [kagi.com].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 27, @06:49PM (1 child)
I'm pretty sure you won't have a good search on the internet without running your own crawler. You can create a local DNS cache while you're at it.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Unixnut on Saturday April 27, @07:29PM
You can try running your own search engine: https://yacy.net/ [yacy.net] is such a distributed search engine. You run your own "node" that has a crawler and an interface to the entire crawled database. You contribute bandwidth to build the database and in return you get to search the db.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Saturday April 27, @07:17PM
yandex.com supports exclusion with a "-" on the trailing terms of your search. I don't know if it supports boolean operations as Google used to, but it is better than nothing (and truth be told, the exclusion operator is what I use most to drill down through search results).
That is one of the reasons why it is my default search engine (only bugbear with it is that every once in a while it asks me to prove I am not a bot with a captcha).
The search engine space is pretty poor, almost everything is basically either Google Or Bing re-branded.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday April 29, @05:44PM
<no-sarcasm>
Remember when you could google for a local restaurant and get useful information? The menu. The prices.
Now, you get only links to third party interlopers who want to take your money to go place your order and deliver it to you. That would be fine if that was WHAT I WAS SEARCHING FOR.
But now Google makes it nearly impossible to find information on a local restaurant.
</no-sarcasm>
Every performance optimization is a grate wait lifted from my shoulders.