November 27, 2024 • 31 mins
In this episode, Ed Zitron tells you the disgraceful story of how Prabhakar Raghavan, Google's former head of ads - led a coup so that he could run Google Search, and how an email chain from 2019 began a cascade of events that would lead to the outright decay of the most important website on the internet.
Original Air Date: 4.25.24
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
All Zone Media. Hi, Better Offline fans, It's me, your
host ed zetron. Now Here in America, it's Thanksgiving, so
we're all given the week off. Robert and Sophie have
told me I'm not allowed to podcast and if they
find out, they're going to once again put me in
the carnival prison. And once again I was sent a
lo quality jpeg of a gun by Robert. Unclear what
(00:23):
it means. Nevertheless, this is one of my favorite episodes
I've ever recorded. It's about a real shithead who destroyed
a product I love, you love and we both are
doomed to use every day. Now. If you're not in America,
and this is a big problem, I don't know what
to tell you. The podcast doesn't cost you any money, unless,
of course, you pay five dollars a month for our
cooler Zoe Media, in which case I apologize deeply. I
(00:46):
will be sleeping not at all this week as penance
for what I've done to you. For the rest of
you in America, no penance necessary, Please enjoy this episode. Hello,
welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host ed zig tron. Well,
(01:14):
and in the next two episodes, I'm going to tell
you the names some of the people responsible for destroying
the Internet. And I'm going to start on February fifth,
twenty nineteen, when Ben Gomes, Google's former head of Search, well,
he had a problem. Jerry Dishler, then the VP and
GM of Ads at Google, and Shivvan Carterman, then the
VP of Engineering Search and Ads on Google properties, had
(01:36):
called something called a code yellow for search revenue due
to and I quote emails that came out as part
of Google's anti trust hearing steady weakness in the daily
numbers and a likeliness that it would end the quarter
significantly behind in metrics. That kind of unclear for those
unfamiliar with Google's internal kind of scientology esque jargon, which
(01:57):
means most people, let me explain, a good yellow isn't
a terrible need to piss or some sort of crisis
of moderate severity. The yellow, according to Stephen Levey's Tell
All book about Google, refers to and I promise this
is not a joke, the color of a tank top
that a former VP of Engineering called Wayne Rosling used
to wear during his time at the company. It's essentially
(02:19):
the equivalent of deafcom I 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 and independently. I've heard there are other
colors like purple. I'm not going to get into that, though,
it's quite boring and irrelevant to this situation. In emails
(02:42):
released as part of the Department of Justices antitrust case
against Google, as a previously mentioned, Dishler laid out several
contributing factors. Search query growth was significantly behind forecast, the
timing of revenue launches was significantly behind, and he had
this vague worry that several advertiser specific and sector weaknesses
existed in search. Now I want to cover something because
(03:03):
I've messed up, and I really want to be clear
about this. I've previously and erroneously referred to the code
yellow as something that Gomes raised as a means of
calling attention to the proximity of Google's ad side getting
a little too close to Search. I'm afraid the truth
is extremely depressing and so much grimmar. The code yellow
was actually the rumble of the goddamn rot economy, with
(03:24):
Google's revenue arms sounding the alarm that its golden goose
wasn't laying enough eggs. Gomes, a Googler of nineteen years
that basically built the foundation of modern search engines, should
go down as one of the few people in tech
that actually fought for an actual principle, and he was
destroyed by a guy called Prabaka Ragavan, a computer scientist
(03:45):
class traitor that sided with the management consultancy sect. More confusingly,
one of their problems was that there was insufficient growth
in queries, as in the amount of things that people
were asking Google. It's a bit like if Ford decided
that things were going poorly because their drivers weren't putting
enough goddamn miles on their trucks. This whole story has
(04:07):
personally upset me, and I think you're going to hear
that in this but going through these emails is just
very depressing. Anyway. A few days beforehand, on February first,
twenty nineteen, Kristen Gil, then Google's VP Business Finance Officer,
had emailed Shashi Thakker, then Google's VP of Engineering Search
and Discover, saying that the ADS team had been considering
(04:29):
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 Thaker stating that there is nothing that the
search team could do to operate at the fidelity of
growth that the ads department had demanded. Shashy Forward did
(04:50):
the email to Gomes asking if there's any way to
discuss this with Sandharpashai, Google CEO, and declared that there
was no way he would sign up for a high
fidelity businessman for daily active users on search. Sakker 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. I want you to
(05:14):
remember that line for later. A day later, on February second,
twenty nineteen, Thacker 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 some lust for growth.
This thread is a dark window into the world of
growth focus tech, where the Kerr listed the multiple points
(05:36):
of disconnection between ADS and search, discussing how the search
team wasn't able to finally optimize engagement on Google without
hacking it, a term that means effectively tricking users into
spending more time on a site, and that doing so
would lead them to and I quote, abandoned work on
efficient journeys. In one email, Fox adds that there was
(05:56):
a pretty big disconnect between what finance and ads wants
Search was doing. Every part of this story pisses me
off so much. When Gomes pushed back on the multiple
requests for growth, Fox added that all three of them
were responsible for Search and that Search was and again
I quote, the revenue engine of the company, and that
(06:17):
bartering with the ads and finance teams was now potentially
the new reality of their jobs. On February sixth, twenty nineteen,
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. On March twenty second, twenty nineteen, Google
VP of Product Management Darshan Kantac would declare the end
(06:41):
of the code yellow. The thread mostly consisted of congratulatory
emails until Gomes made the mistake of responding congratulating everyone,
saying that the plans architected as part of the code
yellow would do well throughout the year. Enter probaka Ragavan,
then Google's head of Ads and the true mastermind behind
the Yellow, who would respond curtly saying that the current
(07:03):
revenue targets were addressed by heroic RPM engineering and that
the core query softness continued without mitigation, a very clunky
way of saying that despite these changes, query growth was
not happening at the rate he needed it to. A
day later, Gomes emailed Fox Andhaker an email he intended
to center Ragavan. He led by saying that he was
(07:24):
annoyed both personally and on behalf of the search team.
In this very long email, he explained in arduous detail
how one might increase engagement with Google Search, but specifically
added that they could increase queries quite easily in the
short term, but only in user negative ways, like turning
off spell correction or ranking improvements, or placing refinements effectively
(07:47):
labels all over the page, adding that it was possible
that there are trade offs here between the different kinds
of user negativity caused by engagement hacking, and that he
was deeply, deeply uncomfortable with this, He also added that
this was the reason he didn't believe that queries, as
in the amount of the things with people searching on Google,
were a good metric to measure search, and that the
(08:08):
best defense against the weaknesses of queries was to create
compelling user experiences that make users want to come back.
Crazy idea there, what if the product was good? Not
good enough? Of prabaka, so little bit of history about
Google here. They regularly throughout the year do Core updates
to Search. These are updates that change the algorithm. Let's say, okay,
(08:30):
we're going to suppress this kind of thing. We can
elevate this kind of thing. And they are actually the
reason that search changes. It's why certain sites suddenly disappear
or reappear. It's why sites get a ton of traffic,
some don't get any, and so on and so forth.
But they do a lot of them. The one that's
really interesting and a little bastard and I went and
looked through pretty much the last decade of these. The
(08:53):
one that stood out to me was the March twenty
nineteen Core update to Search, which happened about a week
before the end of the code yell, meaning that it's
very likely that this was a result of Prabaka's bullshit.
So this was expected to be one of the largest
updates to search in a very long time, and I'm
quoting Search Engine Journal there. Yet when it launched, many
(09:14):
found that the update mostly rolled back changes and traffic
was increasing to sites that had been suppressed by previous updates,
like Google Search's Penguin update from twenty twelve that specifically
targeted spami search results. There were others that were seeing
traffic as well from an update that happened on the
first of August twenty eighteen that was a few months
(09:34):
after Gomes became head of Search. While I'm guessing here,
I really don't know. I do not work for Google.
I do not have friends there. I think the timing
of the March twenty nineteen Core update, along with the
traffic increases the previously suppressed sites that one hundred percent
were spamy seo nonsense. I think these suggest that Google's
response to the Cojello was to roll back changes that
(09:56):
were made to maintain the quality of search. A few
months later, in May twenty nineteen, Google would roll out
a redesign of how ads were shown on Google Search.
Specifically on mobile, replacing the bright green AD label and
URL color on ads with a tiny, little, bolded black
note that said AD in the smallest font you could
possibly put there, with the link looking otherwise identical to
(10:19):
a regular search link. I guess that's how they managed
to start hating their numbers. Hah. And then in January
twenty twenty, Google would bring this change to desktop, and
the vergins John Porter would suggest that it made Google's
ads look just like search results now awesome. Five months later,
a little over a year after the code yellow situation,
(10:42):
Google would make Probakar Ragavan the head of Google Search,
with Jerry Dishler taking his place as the head of Ads.
After nearly twenty years of building Google Search domes would
be relegated to the SVP of Education at Google Domes.
It was a critical part of the original team that
made Google Search work, who has been credited with establishing
(11:03):
the culture of the world's largest and most important search engine,
was chased out by a growth hungry managerial type, several
of them actually led by Probagar Ragavan, a management consultant
wearing an engineer costume. As a side note, by the
way I use the term management consultant there as a pejorative,
while he exhibits all the same being counting morally young
(11:24):
guided behaviors of a management consultant. From what I can tell,
Ragavan has never actually worked in that particular sector of
the economy. But you know who has. San Dhar Pishai,
the CEO of Google, who previously worked at McKinsey, arguably
the most morally abhorrent company that's ever existed, having played
roles both in the two thousand and eight financial crisis,
where it encouraged banks to load up on debt and
(11:46):
floored mortgage backed securities, and the ongoing opiord crisis, where
it effectively advised Perdue Farmer on how to growth hack
sales of oxy content, an extremely addictive painkiller. McKinsey has
paid nearly one billion dollars over several settlements due to
its work with Perdue. But I'm getting sidetracked, but one
last point. McKinsey is actively anti labor. When a company
(12:08):
brings in a McKinsey consultant, they're often there to advise
on how to cut costs, which inevitably means layoffs and outsourcing.
McKinsey is to the middle class. What fleshy in bacteria
is the skin. But back to the emails, which are
(12:32):
a stark example of the monstrous, disgusting rot economy, the
growth that all costs, mindset that's dominating the tech ecosystem.
And if you take one thing away from this episode,
I want it to be the name Prabakar Ragavan, and
I'm understanding that there are people responsible for the current
state of the Internet. These emails, which I really encourage
(12:54):
you to look up and if you go to where's
youreaed dot at, you'll be able to see a newslet
that has links to them. Well, these emails tell a
dramatic story about how Google's finance and advertising teams, led
by Ragavan, with the blessing of CEO Sandhar Pashai, the
McKinsey guy, actively worked to make Google worse to make
the company more money. This is exactly what I mean
(13:16):
when I talk about the economy, an illogical, product destroying
mindset that turns products you love into torturous, frustrating, quasi
tools that require you to fight the company to get
the thing you want. Ben Gomes was instrumental in making
search work both as a product and a business. He
joined the company in nineteen ninety nine, a time long
(13:36):
before Google established dominance in the field, and the same
year when Larry Page and Sergey Britain tried to sell
the company to Excite for one million dollars, only to
walk away after Vinnard Coosler and Excite investor and co
founder of some Microsystems that's now a VC who tried
to stop people going to a beach in half Moon Bay, Well,
he tried to low ball them with a seven hundred
(13:56):
and fifty thousand dollars offer, also known as a one
hundred square apartment in San Francisco. In an interview with
Fast Companies Harry McCracken from twenty eighteen, Gomes frayed Google's
challenge as taking the page erank algorithm from one machine
to a whole bunch of machines and they weren't very
good machines at the time. Despite his impact and tenure,
(14:17):
Gomes had only been made head of Search in the
middle of twenty eighteen after John Gillanderia moved to Apple
to work on its machine learning in AR strategy. Domes
had been described as Google's searches are beloved for his
ability to communicate across Google's many quite decentralized apartments. Every
single article I've read about Gomes and his tenure at
(14:39):
Google spoke of a man deeply ingrained in the foundation
of one of the most important technologies ever made, a
man who had dedicated decades to maintaining a product with
a and I quote Gomes here guiding light of serving
the user and using technology to do that. And when
finally given the keys to the kingdom, the ability to
(14:59):
elevate Google Search even further, he was rap fucked by
a series of rotten carerists trying to please Wall Street,
led by Probakar Ragavan. Do you want to know what
Provacar Ragavan's old job was? What Probacar Ragavan, the new
head of Google Search, the guy that ran Google Search,
that runs Google Search right now, that is running Google
Search into the goddamn ground. Do you want to know
(15:20):
what his job was? His job before Google, He was
the head of search for god damn Yahoo from two
thousand and five through two thy and twelve when he
joined the company. When Probakar Ragavan took over Yahoo Search,
they held a thirty point four percent market share, not
far from Google's own thirty six point nine percent, and
(15:40):
miles ahead of the fifteen point seven percent that Microsoft's
MSN Search had. By May twenty twelve, Yahoo was down
to just thirteen point four percent and had shrunk for
the previous nine consecutive months, and was being beaten by
even the newly released Bing. That same year, Yahoo had
the largest layoffs in its corporate history, shedding two thousand employees,
(16:02):
or fourteen percent of its overall workforce. The man who deposed,
Ben Gomes, someone who worked on Google Search from its
very beginnings, was so shit at his job that in
two thousand and nine, Yahoo effectively threw in the towel
on its own search tech, instead choosing to license Being's
engine in a ten year deal. If we take a
long view of things, this likely precipitated the overall decline
(16:25):
of the company, which went from being worth one hundred
and twenty five billion dollars at the peak of the
dot com boom to being sold to Verizon for four
point eight billion dollars in twenty seventeen, which is roughly
a three thousand square foot apartment in San Francisco. With
search no longer a priority, in making less money, for
the company, Yahoo decided to pivot into Web two point
(16:46):
zero and original content, making sum bats that paid off,
but far far too many that did not. It spent
one point one billion dollars on Tumblr in twenty thirteen,
only for Verizon to sell it for just three million
dollars in twenty nineteen. Zimbra in two thousand and seven,
ostensibly to complete with the new Google Apps productivity Suite,
only to sell it for a reported fraction of the
(17:07):
original purchase price to VMware a few years later. That's
not his fault, but nevertheless, Yahoo was a company without
a mission, a purpose, or an objective. Nobody and I'll
speculate even though his leading the company really knew what
it was and what it did. Anyway, just a big
shout out right now to Kura Swisher, who referred to
Pradaka as well respected. When he moved from Yahoo to Google.
(17:31):
He absolutely nailed at Kara bang up job. In an
interview with ZDNTS Dan Farber from two thousand and five,
Ragavan spoke of his intent to align the commercial incentives
of a billion content providers with social good intent while
at Yahoo and his eagerness to inspire the audience to
give more data. What anyway before that? It's it's actually
(17:53):
hard to find out exactly what Ragavan did, though according
to zd net, he spent fourteen years doing search and
data mind research ibm MM. In April twenty eleven, The
Guardian ran an interview with Ragavan that called him Yahoo's
secret weapon, describing his plan to make rigorous scientific research
and practice to inform Yahoo's business from email to advertising,
(18:16):
and how under then CEO Carol Bart's the focus had
shifted to the direct development of new products. It speaks
of Ragavan's scientific approach and his steady process based logic
to innovation that is very different to the common perception
the ideas and development are more about luck and spontaneity.
A sentence that I'm only reading to you because I
(18:37):
really need you to hear how stupid it sounds and
how specious some of the tech press used to be. Frankly,
this entire article is ridiculous, so utterly vacuous that I'm
actually astonished. I don't want to name the reporter. I
feel bad. What about Ragavan's career made this feel right?
How has nobody connected these thoughts before I have a
(18:58):
day job. I run a PR firm, I am a
blogger with a podcast, and I'm the one who said, yeah, okay,
drag Uller is now the CEO of the blood Bank.
Nobody saw this. Nobody saw this at the time. I
just feel a bit crazy. I feel a bit crazy.
But to be clear, this was something written several years
after Yahoo had licensed its search technology to Microsoft in
(19:21):
a financial deal that the next CEO, Marissa Maya, who
replaced Barts, was still angry about for years. Ragavan's reign
as what zd Neat referred to as the search Master
was one so successful that it ended up being replaced
by a search engine that not a single person in
the world enjoys saying out loud. The Guardian article ran
(19:43):
exactly one year before dramatic layoffs at Yahoo that involved
firing entire divisions worth of people, and four months before
Carol Barts would be fired by telephone by then chairman
Roy Bostock. Her replacement, Scott Thompson, who previously served as
president of PayPal, would last a whole five months in
the role before he was replaced by former Google executive
(20:04):
Marissa Mayer. In part because it emerged he lied on
his resume about having a computer science degree. Hey, Brobaka,
did you not notice that? Anyway? Whatever, Barts joined Yahoo
(20:28):
in two thousand and nine, so about four years into
Braba Kha's reign of terror. I guess, and she joined
in the aftermath of its previous CEO, Jerry Yang, refusing
to sell the company to Microsoft for forty five billion dollars.
In her first year, she laid off hundreds of people
and struck a deal that I've mentioned before to power
Yahoo Search using Microsoft's being search engine tech, with Microsoft
(20:51):
paying Yahoo eighty eight percent of the revenue it gained
from searches, a deal that made ya who are couple
hundred million dollars for handing over the keys and the
tech to its most high traffic platform. As I previously stated,
when Brabakhar Ragavan, Yahoo's secret weapon was doing his work,
Yahoo Search was so valuable that it was replaced by
Bing its sole value. In fact, I mean, maybe I'm
(21:13):
being a little unfair. There's a way of looking at
this that you could say that Yahoo's entire value at
the end of his career was driven by nostalgia and
association with days before he worked there. Anyway, thanks to
the state of modern search. It's actually very, very difficult
to find much about Ragavan's history. It took me hours
of digging through Google and at one point being embarrassingly
(21:36):
to find three or four articles that went into any
depth about him. But from what I've gleaned, his expertise
lies primarily in failing upwards ascending through the ranks of
technology on the momentum from the explosions he's coursed. In
a wide interview from twenty twenty one, GLAD handler Stephen
Levy said Ragavan isn't the CEO of Google, he just
runs the place, and described his addition to the company
(21:57):
as a move from research to management. Bill Levy calls
him a world class computer scientist who has authored definitive
text in the field, which is true. He also describes
Ragavan as choosing a management track, which definitely tracks with
everything I found out about him. Ragavan proudly declares that
Google's third party ad tech plays a critical role in
keeping journalism alive and a really shitty answer to a
(22:19):
question that was also made at a time when he
was in aggressively incentivizing search engine optimized content and a
year after he'd deposed someone who actually gave a shit
about search. Under Ragavan, Google has become less reliable and
it's dominated by search engine optimization and just outright spam.
And I've said this before, but look, we complain about
(22:40):
the state of Twitter under Elon Musk and justifiably he's
a vile, anti, semi racist bigger. We all know this.
It's fully true. We can say a million times. However,
I'd argue that Ragavan, by extension Sandhar Pashai, deserve one
hundred times more criticism. They've on unfathomable damage to society.
(23:02):
You really can't fix the damage they've been doing and
the damage they'll continue to do, especially as we go
into an election. Ragavan and his cronies worked to oust
Ben Gomes, a man who dedicated a good portion of
his life to making the world's information more accessible, in
the process burning the Library of Alexandria to the goddamn
ground so that Sundaar Pshai could make more than two
(23:24):
hundred million dollars a year, and Ragavan, a manager high
by Sundar Peshai, a former McKinsey man. The King of
Managers is an example of everything wrong with the tech industry.
Despite his history as a true computer scientist with actual
academic credentials, Ragavan chose to bulldoze actual workers, people who
did things, and people that care about technology and replace
(23:46):
them with horrifying toadies that would make Google more profitable
and less useful. Since Prabaka took the reigns of Google
in twenty twenty, Google search has dramatically declined with these
foor search updates I mentioned, allegedly made to improve the
quality of results, having the adverse effect increasing the prevalence
(24:07):
of spammy shitty search optimized content. It's frustrating. The anger
you hear in my voice. The emotion is because I've
read all of these antitrust emails. I have gone through
this guy's history, and I've read all the things about
Ben Gomes too. Every article about Ben Gomes where they interviewed,
is this guy just having these dreamy thoughts about the
(24:27):
future of information and the complexity of delivering it at
high speed. Every interview with Ragavan is some vague bullshit
about how important data is. It's so goddamn offensive to me,
and all of this stuff happening is just one example
of what I think are probably hundreds of things happening
across startups or that have happened across startups in the
last ten or fifteen years, and big Tech two. And
(24:50):
it's because the people running the tech industry are no
longer those who built him. Larry Page and Sergey Brin
left Google in December twenty nineteen. The same year is
the code yellow thing, and while they remained as controlling shareholders,
they clearly don't give a shit about what Google means anymore.
Propakar Ragavan is a manager and his career, from what
(25:10):
I can tell, is mostly made up of did some
stuff at IBM, failed to make Yahoo anything of no,
and fucked up Google so badly that every news outlet
has run a story about how bad it is. This
this is the result of taking technology out of the
hands of real builders and handing it to managers at
a time when management is synonymous with staying as far
(25:31):
away from actual work as possible. When you're a do
nothing looking to profit as much as possible, who doesn't
use tech, who doesn't care about tech, and you only
care about growth, well, you're not a user. You're a parasite.
And it's these parasites that have dominated and are now
draining the tech industry of its value. They're driving it
into a goddamn ditch. Ragavan's story is unique in so
(25:55):
far as the damage he's managed to inflict, or if
we're being exceptionally charitable, failed to avoid, in the of
Yahoo on two industry defining companies, and the fact that
he did it without being a CEO or founder is remarkable. Yeah,
he's far from the only example of a manager falling upwards.
I'm going to editorialize a bit here. I need to
(26:17):
think about your job history. I want you to think
about the managers you've had. I've written a lot about management,
and specifically to do with remote work and the whole
thing around guys who don't do work, who are barely
in the office telling you you need to be in
the office. This problem is everywhere. Managers are everywhere, and
managers aren't doing work. I'm sure someone will email me
(26:41):
now and say, well, I'm a manager and off I'll
do work all the time. Yeah, make sure you do.
That's why you're emailing me telling me how good you
are at your job. People who actually do work don't
feel defensive about it. People who do things then are
part of the actual profit center. They don't need a
podcast to tell them they're good at their job. What
(27:01):
I think the problem is in modern American corporate society
is that management is no longer synonymous with actually managing people.
It's not about getting the people what they need. It's
not about organizing things and making things efficient and good.
It's not about execution. It's about handing work off to
other people and getting paid handsomely. And if you disagree
(27:24):
easy at better offline dot Com, I will read your email,
maybe I'll even respond. But the thing is management has
become a poison in America. Managers have become poisonous because
managers are not actually held to any kind of standard. No,
only the workers who do the work are. What happened
to Ben Gomes is one of the most disgusting, disgraceful
(27:46):
things to happen in the tech industry. It's an absolute joke.
Ben Gomes was a goddamn hero. And I really need
you to read the newsletter and read these emails. I
need you to see how many times him and Thaka
great Well were saying, hey, growth is bad for search.
The thing that Ben Gomes was being asked to do
(28:06):
was increase queries on Google, the literal amount that people's search.
There are many ways of looking at that and thinking,
oh shit, that's not what you want. Surely you don't
want no queries. You don't want people not using it
at all, but queries going upwards. Lennearly suggests that if
you're not magic good to use the growth, at least
(28:27):
the people are not getting what they want on the
first try, which, by the way, kind of feels like
how Google is nowadays when you go to Google and
the first result and the second result, and the fifth
result and the tenth result just don't get what you
need because it's all that SEO crap. Now, this is
all theorizing. But what I think prabagar Ragavan did was
(28:47):
I think he took off all the fucking guidelines on
Google Search. I think he rolled back changes specifically to
make search worse, to increase queries, to give Google more
chance to show you adverts. I am guessing don't have
a source telling me this, but the pattern around the
core search updates. The fact that Google Search started getting
(29:08):
worse toward the middle and end of twenty nineteen and
unquestionably dipped in twenty twenty. Well that's when Prabaka took over.
That's when the big Man took the reins. That's when
Drac Killer got his job at the blood bank. And
this is the thing. There's very little that you and
I can actually do about this. But what we can
(29:30):
do is say names like probagar Ragavan a great deal
of times so that people like this can be known,
so that the actions of these scurrilous assholes can be
seen and heard and pointed at and spat upon. I'm
not suggesting spitting on anyone, No violent acts. No can
be pissy on the internet like the rest of us.
(29:50):
Now I'm ranting. I realize i'm ranting, but this subject
really really got to me. But it's not the only one.
In the next episode, I'm going to conclude this sordid
three part fiasco with a few more examples, and how
many of these managers, these bean counters, devoid of imagination
(30:14):
or ability or anything of note save for that utter
slug likability. To protect oneself, I want to talk about
how these people manage to obfiscate their true intentions by
pretending to be engineers, by pretending to be technologists and
pretending to be innovators. I want to tell you all
about how Adam Masseri destroyed Instagram, and I want to
(30:37):
tell you how little Sam Altman has achieved other than
making him and his friends rich. See you next time.
Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and
(30:57):
composer of the Better Offline theme song is matter. You
can check out more of his music and audio projects
at Matasoalski dot com M A T t O s
O w s Ki dot com. You can email me
at easy at Better offline dot com, or check out
Better Offline dot com to find my newsletter and more
links to this podcast. Thank you so much for listening.
(31:19):
Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
All Zone Media. Hi, Better Offline fans, It's me, your
host ed zetron. Now Here in America, it's Thanksgiving, so
we're all given the week off. Robert and Sophie have
told me I'm not allowed to podcast and if they
find out, they're going to once again put me in
the carnival prison. And once again I was sent a
lo quality jpeg of a gun by Robert. Unclear what
(00:23):
it means. Nevertheless, this is one of my favorite episodes
I've ever recorded. It's about a real shithead who destroyed
a product I love, you love and we both are
doomed to use every day. Now. If you're not in America,
and this is a big problem, I don't know what
to tell you. The podcast doesn't cost you any money, unless,
of course, you pay five dollars a month for our
cooler Zoe Media, in which case I apologize deeply. I
(00:46):
will be sleeping not at all this week as penance
for what I've done to you. For the rest of
you in America, no penance necessary, Please enjoy this episode. Hello,
welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host ed zig tron. Well,
(01:14):
and in the next two episodes, I'm going to tell
you the names some of the people responsible for destroying
the Internet. And I'm going to start on February fifth,
twenty nineteen, when Ben Gomes, Google's former head of Search, well,
he had a problem. Jerry Dishler, then the VP and
GM of Ads at Google, and Shivvan Carterman, then the
VP of Engineering Search and Ads on Google properties, had
(01:36):
called something called a code yellow for search revenue due
to and I quote emails that came out as part
of Google's anti trust hearing steady weakness in the daily
numbers and a likeliness that it would end the quarter
significantly behind in metrics. That kind of unclear for those
unfamiliar with Google's internal kind of scientology esque jargon, which
(01:57):
means most people, let me explain, a good yellow isn't
a terrible need to piss or some sort of crisis
of moderate severity. The yellow, according to Stephen Levey's Tell
All book about Google, refers to and I promise this
is not a joke, the color of a tank top
that a former VP of Engineering called Wayne Rosling used
to wear during his time at the company. It's essentially
(02:19):
the equivalent of deafcom I 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 and independently. I've heard there are other
colors like purple. I'm not going to get into that, though,
it's quite boring and irrelevant to this situation. In emails
(02:42):
released as part of the Department of Justices antitrust case
against Google, as a previously mentioned, Dishler laid out several
contributing factors. Search query growth was significantly behind forecast, the
timing of revenue launches was significantly behind, and he had
this vague worry that several advertiser specific and sector weaknesses
existed in search. Now I want to cover something because
(03:03):
I've messed up, and I really want to be clear
about this. I've previously and erroneously referred to the code
yellow as something that Gomes raised as a means of
calling attention to the proximity of Google's ad side getting
a little too close to Search. I'm afraid the truth
is extremely depressing and so much grimmar. The code yellow
was actually the rumble of the goddamn rot economy, with
(03:24):
Google's revenue arms sounding the alarm that its golden goose
wasn't laying enough eggs. Gomes, a Googler of nineteen years
that basically built the foundation of modern search engines, should
go down as one of the few people in tech
that actually fought for an actual principle, and he was
destroyed by a guy called Prabaka Ragavan, a computer scientist
(03:45):
class traitor that sided with the management consultancy sect. More confusingly,
one of their problems was that there was insufficient growth
in queries, as in the amount of things that people
were asking Google. It's a bit like if Ford decided
that things were going poorly because their drivers weren't putting
enough goddamn miles on their trucks. This whole story has
(04:07):
personally upset me, and I think you're going to hear
that in this but going through these emails is just
very depressing. Anyway. A few days beforehand, on February first,
twenty nineteen, Kristen Gil, then Google's VP Business Finance Officer,
had emailed Shashi Thakker, then Google's VP of Engineering Search
and Discover, saying that the ADS team had been considering
(04:29):
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 Thaker stating that there is nothing that the
search team could do to operate at the fidelity of
growth that the ads department had demanded. Shashy Forward did
(04:50):
the email to Gomes asking if there's any way to
discuss this with Sandharpashai, Google CEO, and declared that there
was no way he would sign up for a high
fidelity businessman for daily active users on search. Sakker 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. I want you to
(05:14):
remember that line for later. A day later, on February second,
twenty nineteen, Thacker 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 some lust for growth.
This thread is a dark window into the world of
growth focus tech, where the Kerr listed the multiple points
(05:36):
of disconnection between ADS and search, discussing how the search
team wasn't able to finally optimize engagement on Google without
hacking it, a term that means effectively tricking users into
spending more time on a site, and that doing so
would lead them to and I quote, abandoned work on
efficient journeys. In one email, Fox adds that there was
(05:56):
a pretty big disconnect between what finance and ads wants
Search was doing. Every part of this story pisses me
off so much. When Gomes pushed back on the multiple
requests for growth, Fox added that all three of them
were responsible for Search and that Search was and again
I quote, the revenue engine of the company, and that
(06:17):
bartering with the ads and finance teams was now potentially
the new reality of their jobs. On February sixth, twenty nineteen,
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. On March twenty second, twenty nineteen, Google
VP of Product Management Darshan Kantac would declare the end
(06:41):
of the code yellow. The thread mostly consisted of congratulatory
emails until Gomes made the mistake of responding congratulating everyone,
saying that the plans architected as part of the code
yellow would do well throughout the year. Enter probaka Ragavan,
then Google's head of Ads and the true mastermind behind
the Yellow, who would respond curtly saying that the current
(07:03):
revenue targets were addressed by heroic RPM engineering and that
the core query softness continued without mitigation, a very clunky
way of saying that despite these changes, query growth was
not happening at the rate he needed it to. A
day later, Gomes emailed Fox Andhaker an email he intended
to center Ragavan. He led by saying that he was
(07:24):
annoyed both personally and on behalf of the search team.
In this very long email, he explained in arduous detail
how one might increase engagement with Google Search, but specifically
added that they could increase queries quite easily in the
short term, but only in user negative ways, like turning
off spell correction or ranking improvements, or placing refinements effectively
(07:47):
labels all over the page, adding that it was possible
that there are trade offs here between the different kinds
of user negativity caused by engagement hacking, and that he
was deeply, deeply uncomfortable with this, He also added that
this was the reason he didn't believe that queries, as
in the amount of the things with people searching on Google,
were a good metric to measure search, and that the
(08:08):
best defense against the weaknesses of queries was to create
compelling user experiences that make users want to come back.
Crazy idea there, what if the product was good? Not
good enough? Of prabaka, so little bit of history about
Google here. They regularly throughout the year do Core updates
to Search. These are updates that change the algorithm. Let's say, okay,
(08:30):
we're going to suppress this kind of thing. We can
elevate this kind of thing. And they are actually the
reason that search changes. It's why certain sites suddenly disappear
or reappear. It's why sites get a ton of traffic,
some don't get any, and so on and so forth.
But they do a lot of them. The one that's
really interesting and a little bastard and I went and
looked through pretty much the last decade of these. The
(08:53):
one that stood out to me was the March twenty
nineteen Core update to Search, which happened about a week
before the end of the code yell, meaning that it's
very likely that this was a result of Prabaka's bullshit.
So this was expected to be one of the largest
updates to search in a very long time, and I'm
quoting Search Engine Journal there. Yet when it launched, many
(09:14):
found that the update mostly rolled back changes and traffic
was increasing to sites that had been suppressed by previous updates,
like Google Search's Penguin update from twenty twelve that specifically
targeted spami search results. There were others that were seeing
traffic as well from an update that happened on the
first of August twenty eighteen that was a few months
(09:34):
after Gomes became head of Search. While I'm guessing here,
I really don't know. I do not work for Google.
I do not have friends there. I think the timing
of the March twenty nineteen Core update, along with the
traffic increases the previously suppressed sites that one hundred percent
were spamy seo nonsense. I think these suggest that Google's
response to the Cojello was to roll back changes that
(09:56):
were made to maintain the quality of search. A few
months later, in May twenty nineteen, Google would roll out
a redesign of how ads were shown on Google Search.
Specifically on mobile, replacing the bright green AD label and
URL color on ads with a tiny, little, bolded black
note that said AD in the smallest font you could
possibly put there, with the link looking otherwise identical to
(10:19):
a regular search link. I guess that's how they managed
to start hating their numbers. Hah. And then in January
twenty twenty, Google would bring this change to desktop, and
the vergins John Porter would suggest that it made Google's
ads look just like search results now awesome. Five months later,
a little over a year after the code yellow situation,
(10:42):
Google would make Probakar Ragavan the head of Google Search,
with Jerry Dishler taking his place as the head of Ads.
After nearly twenty years of building Google Search domes would
be relegated to the SVP of Education at Google Domes.
It was a critical part of the original team that
made Google Search work, who has been credited with establishing
(11:03):
the culture of the world's largest and most important search engine,
was chased out by a growth hungry managerial type, several
of them actually led by Probagar Ragavan, a management consultant
wearing an engineer costume. As a side note, by the
way I use the term management consultant there as a pejorative,
while he exhibits all the same being counting morally young
(11:24):
guided behaviors of a management consultant. From what I can tell,
Ragavan has never actually worked in that particular sector of
the economy. But you know who has. San Dhar Pishai,
the CEO of Google, who previously worked at McKinsey, arguably
the most morally abhorrent company that's ever existed, having played
roles both in the two thousand and eight financial crisis,
where it encouraged banks to load up on debt and
(11:46):
floored mortgage backed securities, and the ongoing opiord crisis, where
it effectively advised Perdue Farmer on how to growth hack
sales of oxy content, an extremely addictive painkiller. McKinsey has
paid nearly one billion dollars over several settlements due to
its work with Perdue. But I'm getting sidetracked, but one
last point. McKinsey is actively anti labor. When a company
(12:08):
brings in a McKinsey consultant, they're often there to advise
on how to cut costs, which inevitably means layoffs and outsourcing.
McKinsey is to the middle class. What fleshy in bacteria
is the skin. But back to the emails, which are
(12:32):
a stark example of the monstrous, disgusting rot economy, the
growth that all costs, mindset that's dominating the tech ecosystem.
And if you take one thing away from this episode,
I want it to be the name Prabakar Ragavan, and
I'm understanding that there are people responsible for the current
state of the Internet. These emails, which I really encourage
(12:54):
you to look up and if you go to where's
youreaed dot at, you'll be able to see a newslet
that has links to them. Well, these emails tell a
dramatic story about how Google's finance and advertising teams, led
by Ragavan, with the blessing of CEO Sandhar Pashai, the
McKinsey guy, actively worked to make Google worse to make
the company more money. This is exactly what I mean
(13:16):
when I talk about the economy, an illogical, product destroying
mindset that turns products you love into torturous, frustrating, quasi
tools that require you to fight the company to get
the thing you want. Ben Gomes was instrumental in making
search work both as a product and a business. He
joined the company in nineteen ninety nine, a time long
(13:36):
before Google established dominance in the field, and the same
year when Larry Page and Sergey Britain tried to sell
the company to Excite for one million dollars, only to
walk away after Vinnard Coosler and Excite investor and co
founder of some Microsystems that's now a VC who tried
to stop people going to a beach in half Moon Bay, Well,
he tried to low ball them with a seven hundred
(13:56):
and fifty thousand dollars offer, also known as a one
hundred square apartment in San Francisco. In an interview with
Fast Companies Harry McCracken from twenty eighteen, Gomes frayed Google's
challenge as taking the page erank algorithm from one machine
to a whole bunch of machines and they weren't very
good machines at the time. Despite his impact and tenure,
(14:17):
Gomes had only been made head of Search in the
middle of twenty eighteen after John Gillanderia moved to Apple
to work on its machine learning in AR strategy. Domes
had been described as Google's searches are beloved for his
ability to communicate across Google's many quite decentralized apartments. Every
single article I've read about Gomes and his tenure at
(14:39):
Google spoke of a man deeply ingrained in the foundation
of one of the most important technologies ever made, a
man who had dedicated decades to maintaining a product with
a and I quote Gomes here guiding light of serving
the user and using technology to do that. And when
finally given the keys to the kingdom, the ability to
(14:59):
elevate Google Search even further, he was rap fucked by
a series of rotten carerists trying to please Wall Street,
led by Probakar Ragavan. Do you want to know what
Provacar Ragavan's old job was? What Probacar Ragavan, the new
head of Google Search, the guy that ran Google Search,
that runs Google Search right now, that is running Google
Search into the goddamn ground. Do you want to know
(15:20):
what his job was? His job before Google, He was
the head of search for god damn Yahoo from two
thousand and five through two thy and twelve when he
joined the company. When Probakar Ragavan took over Yahoo Search,
they held a thirty point four percent market share, not
far from Google's own thirty six point nine percent, and
(15:40):
miles ahead of the fifteen point seven percent that Microsoft's
MSN Search had. By May twenty twelve, Yahoo was down
to just thirteen point four percent and had shrunk for
the previous nine consecutive months, and was being beaten by
even the newly released Bing. That same year, Yahoo had
the largest layoffs in its corporate history, shedding two thousand employees,
(16:02):
or fourteen percent of its overall workforce. The man who deposed,
Ben Gomes, someone who worked on Google Search from its
very beginnings, was so shit at his job that in
two thousand and nine, Yahoo effectively threw in the towel
on its own search tech, instead choosing to license Being's
engine in a ten year deal. If we take a
long view of things, this likely precipitated the overall decline
(16:25):
of the company, which went from being worth one hundred
and twenty five billion dollars at the peak of the
dot com boom to being sold to Verizon for four
point eight billion dollars in twenty seventeen, which is roughly
a three thousand square foot apartment in San Francisco. With
search no longer a priority, in making less money, for
the company, Yahoo decided to pivot into Web two point
(16:46):
zero and original content, making sum bats that paid off,
but far far too many that did not. It spent
one point one billion dollars on Tumblr in twenty thirteen,
only for Verizon to sell it for just three million
dollars in twenty nineteen. Zimbra in two thousand and seven,
ostensibly to complete with the new Google Apps productivity Suite,
only to sell it for a reported fraction of the
(17:07):
original purchase price to VMware a few years later. That's
not his fault, but nevertheless, Yahoo was a company without
a mission, a purpose, or an objective. Nobody and I'll
speculate even though his leading the company really knew what
it was and what it did. Anyway, just a big
shout out right now to Kura Swisher, who referred to
Pradaka as well respected. When he moved from Yahoo to Google.
(17:31):
He absolutely nailed at Kara bang up job. In an
interview with ZDNTS Dan Farber from two thousand and five,
Ragavan spoke of his intent to align the commercial incentives
of a billion content providers with social good intent while
at Yahoo and his eagerness to inspire the audience to
give more data. What anyway before that? It's it's actually
(17:53):
hard to find out exactly what Ragavan did, though according
to zd net, he spent fourteen years doing search and
data mind research ibm MM. In April twenty eleven, The
Guardian ran an interview with Ragavan that called him Yahoo's
secret weapon, describing his plan to make rigorous scientific research
and practice to inform Yahoo's business from email to advertising,
(18:16):
and how under then CEO Carol Bart's the focus had
shifted to the direct development of new products. It speaks
of Ragavan's scientific approach and his steady process based logic
to innovation that is very different to the common perception
the ideas and development are more about luck and spontaneity.
A sentence that I'm only reading to you because I
(18:37):
really need you to hear how stupid it sounds and
how specious some of the tech press used to be. Frankly,
this entire article is ridiculous, so utterly vacuous that I'm
actually astonished. I don't want to name the reporter. I
feel bad. What about Ragavan's career made this feel right?
How has nobody connected these thoughts before I have a
(18:58):
day job. I run a PR firm, I am a
blogger with a podcast, and I'm the one who said, yeah, okay,
drag Uller is now the CEO of the blood Bank.
Nobody saw this. Nobody saw this at the time. I
just feel a bit crazy. I feel a bit crazy.
But to be clear, this was something written several years
after Yahoo had licensed its search technology to Microsoft in
(19:21):
a financial deal that the next CEO, Marissa Maya, who
replaced Barts, was still angry about for years. Ragavan's reign
as what zd Neat referred to as the search Master
was one so successful that it ended up being replaced
by a search engine that not a single person in
the world enjoys saying out loud. The Guardian article ran
(19:43):
exactly one year before dramatic layoffs at Yahoo that involved
firing entire divisions worth of people, and four months before
Carol Barts would be fired by telephone by then chairman
Roy Bostock. Her replacement, Scott Thompson, who previously served as
president of PayPal, would last a whole five months in
the role before he was replaced by former Google executive
(20:04):
Marissa Mayer. In part because it emerged he lied on
his resume about having a computer science degree. Hey, Brobaka,
did you not notice that? Anyway? Whatever, Barts joined Yahoo
(20:28):
in two thousand and nine, so about four years into
Braba Kha's reign of terror. I guess, and she joined
in the aftermath of its previous CEO, Jerry Yang, refusing
to sell the company to Microsoft for forty five billion dollars.
In her first year, she laid off hundreds of people
and struck a deal that I've mentioned before to power
Yahoo Search using Microsoft's being search engine tech, with Microsoft
(20:51):
paying Yahoo eighty eight percent of the revenue it gained
from searches, a deal that made ya who are couple
hundred million dollars for handing over the keys and the
tech to its most high traffic platform. As I previously stated,
when Brabakhar Ragavan, Yahoo's secret weapon was doing his work,
Yahoo Search was so valuable that it was replaced by
Bing its sole value. In fact, I mean, maybe I'm
(21:13):
being a little unfair. There's a way of looking at
this that you could say that Yahoo's entire value at
the end of his career was driven by nostalgia and
association with days before he worked there. Anyway, thanks to
the state of modern search. It's actually very, very difficult
to find much about Ragavan's history. It took me hours
of digging through Google and at one point being embarrassingly
(21:36):
to find three or four articles that went into any
depth about him. But from what I've gleaned, his expertise
lies primarily in failing upwards ascending through the ranks of
technology on the momentum from the explosions he's coursed. In
a wide interview from twenty twenty one, GLAD handler Stephen
Levy said Ragavan isn't the CEO of Google, he just
runs the place, and described his addition to the company
(21:57):
as a move from research to management. Bill Levy calls
him a world class computer scientist who has authored definitive
text in the field, which is true. He also describes
Ragavan as choosing a management track, which definitely tracks with
everything I found out about him. Ragavan proudly declares that
Google's third party ad tech plays a critical role in
keeping journalism alive and a really shitty answer to a
(22:19):
question that was also made at a time when he
was in aggressively incentivizing search engine optimized content and a
year after he'd deposed someone who actually gave a shit
about search. Under Ragavan, Google has become less reliable and
it's dominated by search engine optimization and just outright spam.
And I've said this before, but look, we complain about
(22:40):
the state of Twitter under Elon Musk and justifiably he's
a vile, anti, semi racist bigger. We all know this.
It's fully true. We can say a million times. However,
I'd argue that Ragavan, by extension Sandhar Pashai, deserve one
hundred times more criticism. They've on unfathomable damage to society.
(23:02):
You really can't fix the damage they've been doing and
the damage they'll continue to do, especially as we go
into an election. Ragavan and his cronies worked to oust
Ben Gomes, a man who dedicated a good portion of
his life to making the world's information more accessible, in
the process burning the Library of Alexandria to the goddamn
ground so that Sundaar Pshai could make more than two
(23:24):
hundred million dollars a year, and Ragavan, a manager high
by Sundar Peshai, a former McKinsey man. The King of
Managers is an example of everything wrong with the tech industry.
Despite his history as a true computer scientist with actual
academic credentials, Ragavan chose to bulldoze actual workers, people who
did things, and people that care about technology and replace
(23:46):
them with horrifying toadies that would make Google more profitable
and less useful. Since Prabaka took the reigns of Google
in twenty twenty, Google search has dramatically declined with these
foor search updates I mentioned, allegedly made to improve the
quality of results, having the adverse effect increasing the prevalence
(24:07):
of spammy shitty search optimized content. It's frustrating. The anger
you hear in my voice. The emotion is because I've
read all of these antitrust emails. I have gone through
this guy's history, and I've read all the things about
Ben Gomes too. Every article about Ben Gomes where they interviewed,
is this guy just having these dreamy thoughts about the
(24:27):
future of information and the complexity of delivering it at
high speed. Every interview with Ragavan is some vague bullshit
about how important data is. It's so goddamn offensive to me,
and all of this stuff happening is just one example
of what I think are probably hundreds of things happening
across startups or that have happened across startups in the
last ten or fifteen years, and big Tech two. And
(24:50):
it's because the people running the tech industry are no
longer those who built him. Larry Page and Sergey Brin
left Google in December twenty nineteen. The same year is
the code yellow thing, and while they remained as controlling shareholders,
they clearly don't give a shit about what Google means anymore.
Propakar Ragavan is a manager and his career, from what
(25:10):
I can tell, is mostly made up of did some
stuff at IBM, failed to make Yahoo anything of no,
and fucked up Google so badly that every news outlet
has run a story about how bad it is. This
this is the result of taking technology out of the
hands of real builders and handing it to managers at
a time when management is synonymous with staying as far
(25:31):
away from actual work as possible. When you're a do
nothing looking to profit as much as possible, who doesn't
use tech, who doesn't care about tech, and you only
care about growth, well, you're not a user. You're a parasite.
And it's these parasites that have dominated and are now
draining the tech industry of its value. They're driving it
into a goddamn ditch. Ragavan's story is unique in so
(25:55):
far as the damage he's managed to inflict, or if
we're being exceptionally charitable, failed to avoid, in the of
Yahoo on two industry defining companies, and the fact that
he did it without being a CEO or founder is remarkable. Yeah,
he's far from the only example of a manager falling upwards.
I'm going to editorialize a bit here. I need to
(26:17):
think about your job history. I want you to think
about the managers you've had. I've written a lot about management,
and specifically to do with remote work and the whole
thing around guys who don't do work, who are barely
in the office telling you you need to be in
the office. This problem is everywhere. Managers are everywhere, and
managers aren't doing work. I'm sure someone will email me
(26:41):
now and say, well, I'm a manager and off I'll
do work all the time. Yeah, make sure you do.
That's why you're emailing me telling me how good you
are at your job. People who actually do work don't
feel defensive about it. People who do things then are
part of the actual profit center. They don't need a
podcast to tell them they're good at their job. What
(27:01):
I think the problem is in modern American corporate society
is that management is no longer synonymous with actually managing people.
It's not about getting the people what they need. It's
not about organizing things and making things efficient and good.
It's not about execution. It's about handing work off to
other people and getting paid handsomely. And if you disagree
(27:24):
easy at better offline dot Com, I will read your email,
maybe I'll even respond. But the thing is management has
become a poison in America. Managers have become poisonous because
managers are not actually held to any kind of standard. No,
only the workers who do the work are. What happened
to Ben Gomes is one of the most disgusting, disgraceful
(27:46):
things to happen in the tech industry. It's an absolute joke.
Ben Gomes was a goddamn hero. And I really need
you to read the newsletter and read these emails. I
need you to see how many times him and Thaka
great Well were saying, hey, growth is bad for search.
The thing that Ben Gomes was being asked to do
(28:06):
was increase queries on Google, the literal amount that people's search.
There are many ways of looking at that and thinking,
oh shit, that's not what you want. Surely you don't
want no queries. You don't want people not using it
at all, but queries going upwards. Lennearly suggests that if
you're not magic good to use the growth, at least
(28:27):
the people are not getting what they want on the
first try, which, by the way, kind of feels like
how Google is nowadays when you go to Google and
the first result and the second result, and the fifth
result and the tenth result just don't get what you
need because it's all that SEO crap. Now, this is
all theorizing. But what I think prabagar Ragavan did was
(28:47):
I think he took off all the fucking guidelines on
Google Search. I think he rolled back changes specifically to
make search worse, to increase queries, to give Google more
chance to show you adverts. I am guessing don't have
a source telling me this, but the pattern around the
core search updates. The fact that Google Search started getting
(29:08):
worse toward the middle and end of twenty nineteen and
unquestionably dipped in twenty twenty. Well that's when Prabaka took over.
That's when the big Man took the reins. That's when
Drac Killer got his job at the blood bank. And
this is the thing. There's very little that you and
I can actually do about this. But what we can
(29:30):
do is say names like probagar Ragavan a great deal
of times so that people like this can be known,
so that the actions of these scurrilous assholes can be
seen and heard and pointed at and spat upon. I'm
not suggesting spitting on anyone, No violent acts. No can
be pissy on the internet like the rest of us.
(29:50):
Now I'm ranting. I realize i'm ranting, but this subject
really really got to me. But it's not the only one.
In the next episode, I'm going to conclude this sordid
three part fiasco with a few more examples, and how
many of these managers, these bean counters, devoid of imagination
(30:14):
or ability or anything of note save for that utter
slug likability. To protect oneself, I want to talk about
how these people manage to obfiscate their true intentions by
pretending to be engineers, by pretending to be technologists and
pretending to be innovators. I want to tell you all
about how Adam Masseri destroyed Instagram, and I want to
(30:37):
tell you how little Sam Altman has achieved other than
making him and his friends rich. See you next time.
Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and
(30:57):
composer of the Better Offline theme song is matter. You
can check out more of his music and audio projects
at Matasoalski dot com M A T t O s
O w s Ki dot com. You can email me
at easy at Better offline dot com, or check out
Better Offline dot com to find my newsletter and more
links to this podcast. Thank you so much for listening.
(31:19):
Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Ed Zitron
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