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    The man who killed Google Search?

    (www.wheresyoured.at)
    1884 points elorant | 13 comments | 23 Apr 24 16:43 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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    ot1138 ◴[23 Apr 24 18:11 UTC] No.40135156[source]▶
    Phenomenal article, very entertaining and aligns with my experience as a prominent search "outsider" (I founded the first search intelligence service back in 2004, which was later acquired by WPP. Do I have some stories).

    The engineers at Google were wonderful to work with up to 2010. It was like a switch flipped mid-2011 and they became actively hostile to any third party efforts to monitor what they were doing. To put it another way, this would like NBC trying to sue Nielsen from gathering ratings data. Absurd.

    Fortunately, the roadblocks thrown up against us were half-hearted ones and easily circumvented. Nevertheless, I had learned an important lesson about placing reliance for one's life work on a faceless mega tech corporation.

    It was not soon after when Google eliminated "Don't Be Evil" from the mission statement. At least they were somewhat self aware, I suppose.

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    ChuckMcM ◴[23 Apr 24 19:14 UTC] No.40135980[source]▶
    I'm really glad the article came out though, it fills in some gaps that I was fairly confident about but didn't have anything other than my sense of the players and their actions to back up what I thought was going on.

    I and a number of other people left in 2010. I went on to work at Blekko which was trying to 'fix' search using a mix of curation and ranking.

    When I left, this problem of CPC's (the amount Google got per ad click in search) was going down (I believe mostly because of click fraud and advertisers losing faith in Google's metrics). While they were reporting it in their financial results, I had made a little spreadsheet[1] from their quarterly reports and you can see things tanking.

    I've written here and elsewhere about it, and watched from the outside post 2010 and when people were saying "Google is going to steam roll everyone" I was saying, "I don't think so, I think unless they change they are dead already." There are lots of systemic reasons inside Google why it was hard for them to change and many of their processes reinforced the bad side of things rather than the good side. The question for me has always been "Will they pull their head out in time to recover?" recognizing that to do that they would have to be a lot more honest internally about their actions than they were when I was there. I was also way more pessimistic, figuring that they would be having company wide layoffs by 2015 to 2017 but they pushed that out by 5 years.

    I remember pointing out to an engineering director in 2008 that Google was living in the dead husk of SGI[2] which caused them to laugh. They re-assured me that Google was here to stay. I pointed out that Wei Ting told me the same thing about SGI when they were building the campus. (SGI tried to recruit me from Sun which had a campus just down the road from where Google is currently.)

    [1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18_y-Zyhx-5a1_kcW-x7p...

    [2] Silicon Graphics -- https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/peninsula-high-tech...

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    maxerickson ◴[23 Apr 24 19:26 UTC] No.40136121[source]▶
    What is definition of dead? 15 years later they have huge majority of traffic share and lots of revenue.
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    AnthonyMouse ◴[23 Apr 24 19:47 UTC] No.40136383[source]▶
    Companies this size die several years before the body hits the floor.

    They're dead when everyone starts to hate them and someone says "no, look how much money they're making, they're fine." That's the fatal blow, because they think they're fine, and keep doing the things that make everyone hate them.

    At that point you're just waiting for someone else to offer an alternative. Then people prefer the alternative because the incumbent has been screwing them for so long, and even if they change at that point, it's too late because nobody likes or trusts them anymore, and ships that big can't turn on a dime anyway.

    You have to address the rot when customers start complaining about it, not after they've already switched to a competitor.

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    1. ChrisMarshallNY ◴[23 Apr 24 20:26 UTC] No.40136851[source]▶
    That sounds a lot like Kodak.

    I remember running into Kodak engineers, at an event in the 1990s, and they were all complaining about the same thing.

    They were digital engineers, and they were complaining that film people kept sabotaging their projects.

    Kodak invented the digital camera. They should have ruled the roost (at least, until the iPhone came out). Instead, they imploded, almost overnight. The film part was highly profitable.

    Until it wasn't. By then, it was too late. They had cooked the goose.

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    2. binarymax ◴[23 Apr 24 21:05 UTC] No.40137248[source]▶
    If they owned the digital camera space like they should have, who’s to say they wouldn’t have eventually released a smartphone. It probably would have been an absolutely incredible camera first, and some mobile internet and phone features second.

    One can really dream up a fascinating alternate timeline of iKodak if they didnt shoot themselves in the foot.

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    3. jeffbee ◴[23 Apr 24 21:18 UTC] No.40137404[source]▶
    The just-so story about Kodak is one of those things that bugs me. Kodak did own the digital camera market, stem to stern, for years. They did not ignore it. They did, however, invent all that stuff a little early, before the semiconductor manufacturing technology had matured to the point where it could be a consumer good.

    The company imploded because it spent all of its time, attention, and capital trying to become a pharmaceutical factory, starting in the mid-1980s.

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    4. binarymax ◴[23 Apr 24 21:24 UTC] No.40137481[source]▶
    Yeah, lots of things happened for a perfect storm of downfall…probably starting with the antitrust breakup of the film processing division.

    They did indeed have a huge patent arsenal from all their research efforts that was very valuable. They were also really good at consumer tech - so it’s a shame it didn’t amount to more.

    5. SllX ◴[23 Apr 24 22:27 UTC] No.40138091[source]▶
    And even if they didn’t, maybe it would be Kodak sensors in iPhones instead of Sony sensors. A lot of possibilities.
    6. Terr_ ◴[24 Apr 24 01:37 UTC] No.40139462[source]▶
    I'm not a Steve Jobs fan, but one business-quote I do like: "If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will."

    In other words, it could have been better for Kodak as a whole if they allowed their digital-arm to compete more with their film-arm, so that as the market shifted they'd at least be riding the wave rather than under it.

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    7. BlueTemplar ◴[24 Apr 24 04:45 UTC] No.40140677[source]▶
    Note that Nokia was already "great camera, first smartphones".
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    8. MattyRad ◴[24 Apr 24 05:41 UTC] No.40140988[source]▶
    I'm also not a Steve Jobs fan, and this reminds me of how Flash died[1].

    The Flash Renaissance was the counter-era to the search despair era we currently find ourselves in.

    In the same vein as Kodak, I wonder what the alternate timeline would look like where Adobe cannibalized native apps.

    [1] https://youtu.be/65crLKNQR0E?si=mXPgXxlMRxU-xjcu&t=2472

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    9. phonon ◴[24 Apr 24 08:07 UTC] No.40141852[source]▶
    Well, NYSE: EMN is worth $12 B.....
    10. AnthonyMouse ◴[24 Apr 24 09:24 UTC] No.40142260{3}[source]▶
    The mistake Adobe made was in canceling Flash instead of open sourcing it. Publish a spec and the let browsers implement the client side, then you can keep selling tools to make animations without everyone having to deal with the bug-riddled proprietary player Adobe clearly had no interest in properly maintaining to begin with.

    It's kind of astonishing that all these years later we still don't have something equivalent in browsers. In theory they're Turing-complete and you can do whatever you want, but where's the thing that makes it that easy?

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    11. ChrisMarshallNY ◴[24 Apr 24 11:52 UTC] No.40143262{3}[source]▶
    Sony did a rather short-lived modular camera phone.

    It had a magnetic mount, where you could snap on external lenses.

    I'm pretty sure they still have some variant of the concept, except that it's an external camera that uses your phone as a viewfinder.

    12. kalleboo ◴[24 Apr 24 13:15 UTC] No.40144014[source]▶
    One of the problems was just how profitable film was. No amount of digital camera sales is going to be as profitable as being able to charge people $2 per photo (film+development).

    Fujifilm survived by diversifying more into a chemical company than a consumer product company (whereas Kodak sold off those portions of the company as "not being core to consumer imaging" and focused on printers(??))

    And yet even Fuji are now back to having traditional film photography being their single largest revenue generator (their instax instant film is now so popular it is chronically sold out and they are doubling factory capacity to keep up)

    13. underlipton ◴[24 Apr 24 17:02 UTC] No.40146964{4}[source]▶
    What makes you think people want easy? /s I mean, clearly that would be best for creativity, for cultural robustness, for accessibility. Unfortunately, there are a lot of incumbents in all the spaces Flash touched who were ecstatic (if in a schadenfreude-esque sense) to see the ladder pulled up after them. When you make it difficult or impossible for the peons to create, you make it difficult or impossible for them to bypass the professionals and the gatekeepers; when they can't tell their stories, their stories get told for them. Again, the professionals and the gatekeepers (and, now, the propagandists) find this ideal.

    Suffice it to say, there are a lot of people who worked very hard to make sure that the 1998-2012ish period of openness and open-access and democratization was an anomaly. You got to see a mini-echo of this with the rollout and rollback of pandemic-era accessibility.