April 25, 2024 • 30 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.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
All Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Better Offline. I'm
your host ed zig Tron. Well, and in the next
two episodes, I'm going to tell you the names some
(00:22):
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 Shiv Van Carterman, then the VP of Engineering Search
and Ads on Google Properties, had called something called a
code yellow for search revenue due to and I quote
(00:45):
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, in turn,
a kind of scientology esque jargon which means most people,
let me explain, a code yellow isn't a terrible need
(01:07):
to piss or some sort of crisis of moderate severity.
The yellow, according to Stephen Levy'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 the equivalent of deafcom
one and activates, as Levy explained, a war room like
(01:28):
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 released as part of
the Department of Justices antitrust case against Google, as a
(01:51):
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 in sector weaknesses existed in search. Now
I want to cover something because I've messed up, and
I really want to be clear about this. I've previously
(02:12):
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 Google's revenue arms sounding
the alarm that its golden goose wasn't laying enough eggs. Gomes,
(02:35):
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 class traitor that sided with
the management consultancy sect. More confusingly, one of their problems
(02:56):
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 personally upset me, and
I think you're going to hear that in this but
going through these emails is just very depressing.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Anyway.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
A few days beforehand, on February first, twenty nineteen, Kristen Gill,
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 a code yellow to
close the search gap it was seeing, vaguely referring to
how critical that growth was to an unnamed company plan.
(03:44):
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 the email to
Gomes asking if there's any way to discuss this with
Sandar Pashai, Google CEO, and declared that there was no
way he would sign up for a high fidelity business
(04:05):
metric for daily active users on search. Saker 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 remember
that line for later. A day later, on February second,
twenty nineteen, Thacker and Gomes shared their anxieties with Nick Fox,
(04:28):
a vice president of Search and Google assistant, entering a
multiple day long debate about Google's sun lust for growth.
This thread is a dark window into the world of
growth focus Tech, where the Kherr listed the multiple points
of disconnection between ads and Search, discussing how the search
team wasn't able to finally optimize engagement on Google without
(04:48):
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
a pretty big disconnect between what finance and ads wants
and what Search was doing. Every part of this story
(05:09):
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 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
(05:31):
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 Cantac would declare the
end of the Code Yellow. The thread mostly consisted of
congratulatory emails until Gomes made the mistake of responding congratulating everyone,
(05:54):
saying that the plans architected as part of the Code
Yellow would do well throughout the year. Enter Probarka Ragavan,
then Google's head of Ads and the true mastermind behind
the Code Yellow, who would respond curtly saying that the
current revenue targets were addressed by heroic RPM engineering and
that the core query softness continued without mitigation, a very
(06:16):
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 annoyed both personally and on behalf of the search team.
In this very long email, he explained in arduous detail
(06:37):
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
labels all over the page, adding that it was possible
that there are trade offs here between the different kinds
(06:57):
of user negativity caused by engagement hacking, 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 best
defense against the weaknesses of queries was to create compelling
(07:18):
user experiences that make users want to come back.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Crazy idea there, what if the product was good not
good enough?
Speaker 1 (07:25):
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,
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
(07:45):
or reappear. It's why sites get a ton of traffic,
some don't get any, and so on and so forth.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
But they do a lot of them. The one that's really.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Interesting and a little bastard and I went and looked
through pretty much the last decade of these, the one
that stood out to me it was the March twenty
nineteen core update to Search, which happened about a week
before the end of the code yellow, 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
(08:15):
quoting Search Engine Journal there. Yet when it launched, many
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.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
There were others that were.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
Seeing traffic as well from an update that happened on
the first of August twenty eighteen that was a few
months after Gomes became head of Search.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
While I'm guessing here, I really don't know. I do
not work for Google.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
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 co jello was to roll back changes
that were made to maintain the quality of search. A
few months later, in May twenty nineteen, Google would roll
(09:08):
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
a regular search link. I guess that's how they managed
(09:28):
to start hitting 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,
Google would make Probakar Ragavan the head of Google Search,
(09:51):
with Jerry Dishler taking his place as the head of Ads.
After nearly twenty years of building Google Search, Gomes would
be relegated to the spe VP of Education at Google. Domes,
who was a critical part of the original team that
made Google Search work, who has been credited with establishing
the culture of the world's largest and most important search engine,
(10:12):
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
guided behaviors of a management consultant. From what I can tell,
(10:33):
Ragavan has never actually worked in that particular sector of
the economy.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
But you know who has.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
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 floored mortgage backed securities, and the ongoing opioord crisis,
where it effectively advised Perdue Farmer on how to growth
hack sales of oxy content and extremely addictive painkiller. McKinsey
(11:03):
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 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
(11:24):
in bacteria is the skin. But back to the emails,
which are a stark example of the monstrous, disgusting rot economy,
the growth that all costs mindset that's dominating the tech ecosystem.
(11:46):
And if you take one thing away from this episode,
I want it to be the name Prabakar Ragavan and
an understanding that there are people responsible for the current
state of the Internet. These emails, which I really encourage
you to look, and if you go to where's youreed
dot at, you'll be able to see a newsletter that
has links to them. Well, these emails tell a dramatic
(12:07):
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 when I
talk about the economy, an illogical, product destroying mindset that
turns products you love into torturous frustrating quasi tools that
(12:29):
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 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
(12:50):
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 Halfman Bay, Well, he
tried a low ball and with a seven hundred and
fifty thousand dollars offer also known as a one hundred
square foot apartment in San Francisco. In an interview with
Fast Companies Harry McCracken from twenty eighteen, Gomes freyed Google's
(13:12):
challenge as taking the page rank 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,
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 and AR strategy. Domes
had been described as Google's searches are beloved for his
(13:35):
ability to communicate across Google's many quite decentralized apartments. Every
single article I've read about Gomes and his tenure at
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
(13:57):
the user and using technology to do that.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
And when finally given the keys.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
To the kingdom the ability to elevate Google Search even further,
he was rap fucked by a series of rotten careerists
trying to please Wall Street, led by Provakar 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.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Do you want to know what his job was?
Speaker 1 (14:26):
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 miles ahead of the
(14:47):
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 Eva, the newly released BING.
That same year, Yahoo had the largest layoffs in its
corporate history, shedding two thousand employees, or fourteen percent of
(15:08):
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 Bing's engine in a ten year deal.
If we take a long view of things, this likely
(15:29):
precipitated the overall decline 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
(15:51):
Web two point 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. It put Zimbra in
two thousand and seven ostensibly to complete with the new
Google Apps productivity suite, only to sell it for a
(16:11):
reported fraction of the 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
(16:34):
Yahoo to Google. He absolutely nailed at Kara bang up job.
In an interview with zd and ets 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.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
What anyway before that, It's it's actually hard.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
To find out exactly what Ragava and did, though according
to ZDNA, he spent fourteen years doing search and data
mining 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
(17:18):
to inform Yahoo's business from email to advertising, 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
(17:40):
that I'm only reading to you because I really need
you to hear how stupid it sounds and how specious
some of the tech press.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Used to be.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
Frankly, this entire article is ridiculous, so utterly vacuous, that
I'm actually astonished I don't want to name the reporter.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
I feel bad.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
What about Ragavan's career made this feel right? How has
nobody connected these thoughts before? I have a 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.
(18:18):
But to be clear, this was something written several years
after Yahoo had licensed its search technology to Microsoft in
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
(18:41):
by a search engine that not a single person in
the world enjoys saying out loud. The Guardian article ran
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 bost. Her replacement Scott Thompson, who previously served as
(19:03):
president of PayPal. Would last a whole five months in
the role before he was replaced by former Google executive
Marissa Mayer, in part because it emerged he lied on
his resume about having a computer science degree.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Hey, Brobaka, did you not notice that anyway? Whatever?
Speaker 1 (19:32):
Barts joined Yahoo in two thousand and nine, so about
four years into Broba 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
(19:55):
engine Tech, with Microsoft paying Yahoo eighty eight percent of
the revenue a game from searches. A deal made Yahoo
a couple hundred million dollars for handing over the keys
and the take 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
(20:17):
mean maybe I'm 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
(20:39):
being embarrassingly 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
(20:59):
just run the place, and described his addition to the
company as a move from research to management. While 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
(21:21):
in keeping journalism alive, and a really shitty answer to
a 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 is dominated by search engine optimization and just
outright spam. And I've said this before, but look, we
(21:45):
complain about 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 some Ar Pashai deserve
one hundred times more criticism. They've done unfathomable damage to society.
(22:07):
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 Sundar Pashai could make more than two
(22:29):
hundred million dollars a year, and Ragavan a Manager High
by Sundar Pashai, a former McKinzie 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
(22:51):
them with horrifying toadies that would make Google more profitable
and less useful. Since Prabakar took the reins of Google
in twenty twenty, Google search has dramatically declined with these
core search updates I mentioned, allegedly made to improve the
quality of results, having the adverse effect increasing the prevalence
(23:12):
of spammy shitty search optimized content.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
It's frustrating. The anger you hear in my voice.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
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 future of information and the
complexity of delivering it at high speed.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Every interview with Ragavan.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
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 it's because the people running
the tech industry are no longer those who build Tim
(24:00):
Larry Page and Sergey Brin left Google in December twenty nineteen,
the same year, by the way as the Code Yellow thing,
and while they remained as co controlling shareholders, they clearly
don't give a shit about what Google means anymore. Propakar
Ragavan is a manager, and his career, from what I
can tell, is mostly made up of did some stuff
at IBM, failed to make Yahoo anything of no, and
(24:22):
fucked up Google so badly that every news outlet has
run a story about how.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
Bad it is.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
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 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.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
Well, you're not a.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
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 far as the damage he's managed to inflict,
or if we're being exceptionally charitable, failed to avoid in
the case of Yahoo, on two industry defining companies, and
(25:09):
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 want to 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
(25:29):
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 now and say, well,
I'm a manager and off I'll do work all the time.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Yeah, make sure you do.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
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
I think the problem is in modern American corporate society
(26:11):
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
easy at better offline dot com, I will read your email,
(26:32):
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
things to happen in the tech industry. It's an absolute joke.
(26:55):
Ben Gomes was a goddamn hero. And I really need
you to read the news there and read these emails.
I need you to see how many times him and
Thakka Great Guy as well were saying, hey, growth is
bad for search. The thing that Ben Gomes was being
asked to do was increase queries on Google, the literal
amount that people's search. There are many ways of looking
(27:18):
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, get to use the growth.
At least 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
(27:41):
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 I think he took off all the fucking
guidelines on Google Search. I think he rolled back changes
specifically to make search, to increase queries, to give Google
(28:03):
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 worse toward the middle and end of twenty nineteen
and unquestionably dipped in twenty twenty. Well, that's when Prabakar
took over, That's when the big man took the reins.
(28:26):
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 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
(28:49):
not suggesting spitting on anyone, no violent acts. No can
be pissy on the internet like the.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
Rest of us. Now I'm ranting. I realize i'm ranting,
but this subject, really, it really got to me. But
it's not the only one.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
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
or ability or anything of note save for that utter
slug likability. To protect oneself, I want to talk about
(29:27):
how these people manage to obfiscate their true intentions by
pretending to be engineers, by pretending to be technologists, and pretending.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
To be innovators.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
I want to tell you all about how Adam Masseri
destroyed Instagram, and I want to tell you how little
Sam Altman has achieved other than making him and his
friends rich. See you next time. Thank you for listening
(30:01):
to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better
Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can check out more
of his music and audio projects at Matasowski 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.
(30:22):
Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Speaker 1 (30:30):
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
All Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Better Offline. I'm
your host ed zig Tron. Well, and in the next
two episodes, I'm going to tell you the names some
(00:22):
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 Shiv Van Carterman, then the VP of Engineering Search
and Ads on Google Properties, had called something called a
code yellow for search revenue due to and I quote
(00:45):
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, in turn,
a kind of scientology esque jargon which means most people,
let me explain, a code yellow isn't a terrible need
(01:07):
to piss or some sort of crisis of moderate severity.
The yellow, according to Stephen Levy'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 the equivalent of deafcom
one and activates, as Levy explained, a war room like
(01:28):
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 released as part of
the Department of Justices antitrust case against Google, as a
(01:51):
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 in sector weaknesses existed in search. Now
I want to cover something because I've messed up, and
I really want to be clear about this. I've previously
(02:12):
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 Google's revenue arms sounding
the alarm that its golden goose wasn't laying enough eggs. Gomes,
(02:35):
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 class traitor that sided with
the management consultancy sect. More confusingly, one of their problems
(02:56):
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 personally upset me, and
I think you're going to hear that in this but
going through these emails is just very depressing.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Anyway.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
A few days beforehand, on February first, twenty nineteen, Kristen Gill,
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 a code yellow to
close the search gap it was seeing, vaguely referring to
how critical that growth was to an unnamed company plan.
(03:44):
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 the email to
Gomes asking if there's any way to discuss this with
Sandar Pashai, Google CEO, and declared that there was no
way he would sign up for a high fidelity business
(04:05):
metric for daily active users on search. Saker 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 remember
that line for later. A day later, on February second,
twenty nineteen, Thacker and Gomes shared their anxieties with Nick Fox,
(04:28):
a vice president of Search and Google assistant, entering a
multiple day long debate about Google's sun lust for growth.
This thread is a dark window into the world of
growth focus Tech, where the Kherr listed the multiple points
of disconnection between ads and Search, discussing how the search
team wasn't able to finally optimize engagement on Google without
(04:48):
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
a pretty big disconnect between what finance and ads wants
and what Search was doing. Every part of this story
(05:09):
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 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
(05:31):
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 Cantac would declare the
end of the Code Yellow. The thread mostly consisted of
congratulatory emails until Gomes made the mistake of responding congratulating everyone,
(05:54):
saying that the plans architected as part of the Code
Yellow would do well throughout the year. Enter Probarka Ragavan,
then Google's head of Ads and the true mastermind behind
the Code Yellow, who would respond curtly saying that the
current revenue targets were addressed by heroic RPM engineering and
that the core query softness continued without mitigation, a very
(06:16):
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 annoyed both personally and on behalf of the search team.
In this very long email, he explained in arduous detail
(06:37):
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
labels all over the page, adding that it was possible
that there are trade offs here between the different kinds
(06:57):
of user negativity caused by engagement hacking, 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 best
defense against the weaknesses of queries was to create compelling
(07:18):
user experiences that make users want to come back.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Crazy idea there, what if the product was good not
good enough?
Speaker 1 (07:25):
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,
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
(07:45):
or reappear. It's why sites get a ton of traffic,
some don't get any, and so on and so forth.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
But they do a lot of them. The one that's really.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Interesting and a little bastard and I went and looked
through pretty much the last decade of these, the one
that stood out to me it was the March twenty
nineteen core update to Search, which happened about a week
before the end of the code yellow, 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
(08:15):
quoting Search Engine Journal there. Yet when it launched, many
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.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
There were others that were.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
Seeing traffic as well from an update that happened on
the first of August twenty eighteen that was a few
months after Gomes became head of Search.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
While I'm guessing here, I really don't know. I do
not work for Google.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
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 co jello was to roll back changes
that were made to maintain the quality of search. A
few months later, in May twenty nineteen, Google would roll
(09:08):
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
a regular search link. I guess that's how they managed
(09:28):
to start hitting 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,
Google would make Probakar Ragavan the head of Google Search,
(09:51):
with Jerry Dishler taking his place as the head of Ads.
After nearly twenty years of building Google Search, Gomes would
be relegated to the spe VP of Education at Google. Domes,
who was a critical part of the original team that
made Google Search work, who has been credited with establishing
the culture of the world's largest and most important search engine,
(10:12):
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
guided behaviors of a management consultant. From what I can tell,
(10:33):
Ragavan has never actually worked in that particular sector of
the economy.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
But you know who has.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
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 floored mortgage backed securities, and the ongoing opioord crisis,
where it effectively advised Perdue Farmer on how to growth
hack sales of oxy content and extremely addictive painkiller. McKinsey
(11:03):
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 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
(11:24):
in bacteria is the skin. But back to the emails,
which are a stark example of the monstrous, disgusting rot economy,
the growth that all costs mindset that's dominating the tech ecosystem.
(11:46):
And if you take one thing away from this episode,
I want it to be the name Prabakar Ragavan and
an understanding that there are people responsible for the current
state of the Internet. These emails, which I really encourage
you to look, and if you go to where's youreed
dot at, you'll be able to see a newsletter that
has links to them. Well, these emails tell a dramatic
(12:07):
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 when I
talk about the economy, an illogical, product destroying mindset that
turns products you love into torturous frustrating quasi tools that
(12:29):
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 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
(12:50):
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 Halfman Bay, Well, he
tried a low ball and with a seven hundred and
fifty thousand dollars offer also known as a one hundred
square foot apartment in San Francisco. In an interview with
Fast Companies Harry McCracken from twenty eighteen, Gomes freyed Google's
(13:12):
challenge as taking the page rank 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,
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 and AR strategy. Domes
had been described as Google's searches are beloved for his
(13:35):
ability to communicate across Google's many quite decentralized apartments. Every
single article I've read about Gomes and his tenure at
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
(13:57):
the user and using technology to do that.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
And when finally given the keys.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
To the kingdom the ability to elevate Google Search even further,
he was rap fucked by a series of rotten careerists
trying to please Wall Street, led by Provakar 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.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Do you want to know what his job was?
Speaker 1 (14:26):
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 miles ahead of the
(14:47):
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 Eva, the newly released BING.
That same year, Yahoo had the largest layoffs in its
corporate history, shedding two thousand employees, or fourteen percent of
(15:08):
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 Bing's engine in a ten year deal.
If we take a long view of things, this likely
(15:29):
precipitated the overall decline 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
(15:51):
Web two point 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. It put Zimbra in
two thousand and seven ostensibly to complete with the new
Google Apps productivity suite, only to sell it for a
(16:11):
reported fraction of the 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
(16:34):
Yahoo to Google. He absolutely nailed at Kara bang up job.
In an interview with zd and ets 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.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
What anyway before that, It's it's actually hard.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
To find out exactly what Ragava and did, though according
to ZDNA, he spent fourteen years doing search and data
mining 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
(17:18):
to inform Yahoo's business from email to advertising, 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
(17:40):
that I'm only reading to you because I really need
you to hear how stupid it sounds and how specious
some of the tech press.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Used to be.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
Frankly, this entire article is ridiculous, so utterly vacuous, that
I'm actually astonished I don't want to name the reporter.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
I feel bad.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
What about Ragavan's career made this feel right? How has
nobody connected these thoughts before? I have a 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.
(18:18):
But to be clear, this was something written several years
after Yahoo had licensed its search technology to Microsoft in
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
(18:41):
by a search engine that not a single person in
the world enjoys saying out loud. The Guardian article ran
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 bost. Her replacement Scott Thompson, who previously served as
(19:03):
president of PayPal. Would last a whole five months in
the role before he was replaced by former Google executive
Marissa Mayer, in part because it emerged he lied on
his resume about having a computer science degree.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Hey, Brobaka, did you not notice that anyway? Whatever?
Speaker 1 (19:32):
Barts joined Yahoo in two thousand and nine, so about
four years into Broba 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
(19:55):
engine Tech, with Microsoft paying Yahoo eighty eight percent of
the revenue a game from searches. A deal made Yahoo
a couple hundred million dollars for handing over the keys
and the take 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
(20:17):
mean maybe I'm 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
(20:39):
being embarrassingly 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
(20:59):
just run the place, and described his addition to the
company as a move from research to management. While 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
(21:21):
in keeping journalism alive, and a really shitty answer to
a 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 is dominated by search engine optimization and just
outright spam. And I've said this before, but look, we
(21:45):
complain about 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 some Ar Pashai deserve
one hundred times more criticism. They've done unfathomable damage to society.
(22:07):
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 Sundar Pashai could make more than two
(22:29):
hundred million dollars a year, and Ragavan a Manager High
by Sundar Pashai, a former McKinzie 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
(22:51):
them with horrifying toadies that would make Google more profitable
and less useful. Since Prabakar took the reins of Google
in twenty twenty, Google search has dramatically declined with these
core search updates I mentioned, allegedly made to improve the
quality of results, having the adverse effect increasing the prevalence
(23:12):
of spammy shitty search optimized content.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
It's frustrating. The anger you hear in my voice.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
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 future of information and the
complexity of delivering it at high speed.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Every interview with Ragavan.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
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 it's because the people running
the tech industry are no longer those who build Tim
(24:00):
Larry Page and Sergey Brin left Google in December twenty nineteen,
the same year, by the way as the Code Yellow thing,
and while they remained as co controlling shareholders, they clearly
don't give a shit about what Google means anymore. Propakar
Ragavan is a manager, and his career, from what I
can tell, is mostly made up of did some stuff
at IBM, failed to make Yahoo anything of no, and
(24:22):
fucked up Google so badly that every news outlet has
run a story about how.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
Bad it is.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
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 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.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
Well, you're not a.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
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 far as the damage he's managed to inflict,
or if we're being exceptionally charitable, failed to avoid in
the case of Yahoo, on two industry defining companies, and
(25:09):
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 want to 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
(25:29):
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 now and say, well,
I'm a manager and off I'll do work all the time.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Yeah, make sure you do.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
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
I think the problem is in modern American corporate society
(26:11):
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
easy at better offline dot com, I will read your email,
(26:32):
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
things to happen in the tech industry. It's an absolute joke.
(26:55):
Ben Gomes was a goddamn hero. And I really need
you to read the news there and read these emails.
I need you to see how many times him and
Thakka Great Guy as well were saying, hey, growth is
bad for search. The thing that Ben Gomes was being
asked to do was increase queries on Google, the literal
amount that people's search. There are many ways of looking
(27:18):
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, get to use the growth.
At least 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
(27:41):
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 I think he took off all the fucking
guidelines on Google Search. I think he rolled back changes
specifically to make search, to increase queries, to give Google
(28:03):
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 worse toward the middle and end of twenty nineteen
and unquestionably dipped in twenty twenty. Well, that's when Prabakar
took over, That's when the big man took the reins.
(28:26):
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 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
(28:49):
not suggesting spitting on anyone, no violent acts. No can
be pissy on the internet like the.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
Rest of us. Now I'm ranting. I realize i'm ranting,
but this subject, really, it really got to me. But
it's not the only one.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
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
or ability or anything of note save for that utter
slug likability. To protect oneself, I want to talk about
(29:27):
how these people manage to obfiscate their true intentions by
pretending to be engineers, by pretending to be technologists, and pretending.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
To be innovators.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
I want to tell you all about how Adam Masseri
destroyed Instagram, and I want to tell you how little
Sam Altman has achieved other than making him and his
friends rich. See you next time. Thank you for listening
(30:01):
to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better
Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can check out more
of his music and audio projects at Matasowski 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.
(30:22):
Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Speaker 1 (30:30):
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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