Requiem for Raghavan

Bringing in McKinsey folks into a place like Google is odd. Seems like they’ve finally abandoned their engineering roots and headed into “enterprisey” bullshittery.

Sundar is former McKinsey I believe. So it starts at the top and has been the case for years.

This happened long ago and is a common pattern has companies transition away from founder led (without all the drama inherent in the “founder mode” meme).

If history rhymes and Sundar is Google Ballmer and I wonder what the next era may hold.

Google brought a lot of great tech, products and people forward and I do hope they find a way back to a more vibrant culture.

It's hard to express to people who haven't been in the industry since before the late 90s how completely Google's search changed things. For a while it seemed like we were rotating through search engines yearly, each time getting incrementally better than the last one. PageRank rewrote the rules.

Watching Google search and search on the internet generally degrade back to looking like the mid-90s has been a painful loss for those, including myself, who had gotten lazy about curating our own links and bookmarks. These days I am more careful about collecting and storing sources I find, lest they disappear from a Google search or get buried in the next wave of AI-generated SEO sewage.

Back at its peak, Google felt almost like some Utopian movement. "I work for Google" was the biggest brag, and almost everyone taking an undergraduate computing course would dream of landing a position there after graduating. It branded itself as wanting to give tech to the people; it wasn't closed off and corporate like Microsoft. It was big and powerful but it was on your side. The people who worked there got to choose their own hours and take naps on bean bags. And they gave the impression they were fine taking big, long-term bets on the future. Sure, a lot of that had a dark side (choose your own hours often leads to people just working more...) and was good marketing, but it was reflected in some of their products. They used to have internal rules and guidelines towards good design. The Google search was fast, uncluttered, gave you just the right amount of information, ordered well, and never broke that flow for a buck. The bucks were made but always in a way that didn't intrude on your experience. That's just not the case anymore.

I remember they used to have a rule that if you loaded a Google page, there should be no subsequent movement of items on the page. E.g., you should never load a page and move your mouse to a button only for an ad/vision/whatever to load, expand, and push that button away. It's small, but it says something about the way the company works. Most websites do stuff like that because a slow-loading ad must be loaded regardless of what you want because the ad is the business. "Oh, the text you read suddenly flew away out of view? What do I care? I'm here to make money; now watch the ad and then go back to whatever you were doing". For a time, Google gave this impression it wouldn't bother with those cheap tricks. Then one day I went to Google, and everything jumped around as some ads loaded, and I knew the heyday was gone.

Now Google feels like the opposite of what it was going for. Closed off, secretive, chasing easy, cheap money through tricks, shutting down anything and everything long-term because long-term isn't next quarter, and that's all that matters. People want to work there, but only because they pay, not because they believe they do good. It makes me sad in a way because the Google people wanted Google to be felt somewhat possible, but maybe it's just not. The shit finds a way of leaking in and taking over eventually.

Once Google came out there was no going back to Hotbot, AltaVista, etc.

I only ascribe a small portion of decline in search result quality to Google's own in/actions. The modern commercial web is diabolically weaponized against Google to put undesired content in front of searchers.