The man who killed Google Search?

Ex-Google search engineer here (2019-2023). I know a lot of the veteran engineers were upset when Ben Gomes got shunted off. Probably the bigger change, from what I've heard, was losing Amit Singhal who led Search until 2016. Amit fought against creeping complexity. There is a semi-famous internal document he wrote where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning, or at least contain it as much as possible, so that ranking stays debuggable and understandable by human search engineers. My impression is that since he left complexity exploded, with every team launching as many deep learning projects as they can (just like every other large tech company has).

The problem though, is the older systems had obvious problems, while the newer systems have hidden bugs and conceptual issues which often don't show up in the metrics, and which compound over time as more complexity is layered on. For example: I found an off by 1 error deep in a formula from an old launch that has been reordering top results for 15% of queries since 2015. I handed it off when I left but have no idea whether anyone actually fixed it or not.

I wrote up all of the search bugs I was aware of in an internal document called "second page navboost", so if anyone working on search at Google reads this and needs a launch go check it out.

Machine learning or not, seo spam sort of killed search. It’s more or less impossible to find real sites by interesting humans these days. Almost all results are Reddit, YouTube, content marketing, or seo spam. And google’s failure here killed the old school blogosphere (medium and substack only slightly count), personal websites, and forums

Same is happening to YouTube as well. Feels like it’s nothing but promoters pushing content to gain followers to sell ads or other stuff because nobody else’s videos ever surface. Just a million people gaming the algorithm and the only winners are the people who devote the most time to it. And by the way, would I like to sign up for their patreon and maybe one of their online courses?

I think a case can be made that the spam problem can be traced all the way back to Google buying Doubleclick.

Its really easy to spot the crap websites that are scaping content-creating websites ... because they monetize by adding ads.

If Google was _only_ selling ads on the search results page, then it could promote websites that are sans ads.

Instead, it is incentivised to push users to websites that contain ads, because it also makes money there.

And that means scraping other sites to slap your ads onto them can be very profitable for the scammers.