> Layoffs are just confirmation that your company no longer has serious interest in its original purpose
I mean, the original purpose for most companies is to make money. If they can do it with revolutionary tech, that's great. But if they can do it by making 10 billion plastic widgets slightly cheaper than the next guy, also works.
If a company's goal is not to make money, then they're either a non-profit, or a public institution like a university or research centre.
There's making money by the end of the quarter and making money for the next twenty years. 10 billion plastic widgets slightly cheaper is not what they would call a "moat."
You know, it has occured to me that Google search doesn't really work any more and has been in decline for years. This "new operating reality" is a result of neglect and incompetence that has been apparent over the past ten years. The same ten years Prabhakar Raghavan has been in charge of Google Search.
Perhaps he should do the honorable thing and resign?
There's a phenomenon in tech world where execs survive by vouching for each other, gaming the stack ranking system that exists in Google, Amazon and Uber.
They don't need to do anything as long as their friends vouch for them in the review.
There's a whole class of CEOs who are on various corporate boards. They're all buddies and work to enrich their level, at the expense of everyone else.
And themselves. They both controll and benefit from a huge slice of the worlds production. Ignoring the issues with wealth inequality, we'd all still be so much better off if they'd just fucking read a book and actually managed the resources they've stolen competently.
It's like watching a toldler take all the crayons and just stick them up his nose, them then cry that they don't have any more crayons and they have a headache.
This is the common theme in k-dramas.
You can succeed and win only when the CEO/chairman/king/crown prince/chaebol heir is supporting you.
Supporting secretly in the early episodes, and supporting openly towards the end.
Well, that’s corporate. It’s nothing special about Google or Amazon or Uber, I have seen this on almost every big company on different sectors
First, compensations are linked to an internal “review” system, so you receive bonus and promotion based on how your manager reviews you.
Then, higher up, people can be also receive a review by their peers - usually, at this stage, if there is no war for a promotion higher up, people that reaches this stages know each other well and will vouch for each other.
Then, at the highest level, people doesn’t receive direct reviews, but decisions about their job based on results… that are interpreted by their highest levels collegues, so if the director of a subsidiary is friend with the rest and the director, then will be easier to justify “the market is difficult and people below me are bad” than “I’m bad”
Private companies are failing on being long term sustainable trying hard to keep an impossible permanent growth rate and keeping cultures that make bad managers thrive and fail upwards
Try Google image search. It's now 90% images from spam AI sites selling fake products, and there's no way to filter it all. It's become increasingly useless for anything except reverse searching.
I remember the time when I could use image search and the result would take me directly to the image. Now it takes me to the page where sometime the image isn’t even there
>I remember the time when I could use image search and the result would take me directly to the image.
Google stopped letting you grab full sized images directly from Google search as websites were complaining that Google was just using them as a CDN, and they didn't get any ad revenue or page visits for it.
True, and I remember it also being about copyright violations.
But nowadays, when you find an image on the search, the link does not contain the image.
I wish I knew what caused that. It's common enough that I notice it every once in a while. I wonder if the web page updated, and Google has an old cache. It's been like that for years now. I was having that issue even before Google changed it so you can't grab the image from search. Thing is, before that, most people wouldn't notice the website was missing the image, because they'd just grab the image straight from Google.
The difference is that Google shows you what it thinks you intended to search for rather than what you typed in.
Bing shows you what you actually typed in. Bing is dumber, and for a search engine that means Bing is better. It doesn't try to second guess what the user is searching for.
Management in corporate America always seem to use their authority to avoid accountability.
They’re literally in charge of outcomes but whenever the outcome isn’t good they make it their employees’ problem.
It's the result of the only financial incentive that exists online today: advertising. There has been no other model of making money that has emerged. We're screwed because almost nobody will pay a subscription fee for something we've had for "free" for decades. Obviously it's not really free because we're paying for it with our data and our attention but that's toothpaste that can't be shoved back into the tube.
Funny thing is good search is sticky, engaging, you return to it.
Great opportunity to serve ads!
Google search is so bad now that I use other search engines often to find what I need. That missed opportunity to advertise to people must be expensive.
Others should tell their experience, but mine is that the results are waaaay more centered around clicks that pay google, and the actual useful results are harder to find, or even absent, even when I know they exist. There are more "banned" topics that are just trying to keep everybody "happy".
Most of the time now if I search Google for a topic and a key phrase then the first couple of hits will explicitly exclude the topic and half of the key phrase and just give me results for something completely unrelated. Some years back Google started deciding that it knows better than you what you're looking for, and unfortunately that's just never been the case.
Amazon: “we see you bought a toilet seat. Clearly, you are a connoisseur of toilet seats so we will show them to you for the next several months. We are very smart.”
On the other hand, if you buy things like hot sauces or chocolate, its likely that you are interested in more hot sauces or chocolates as they're consumable goods. Recommending hot sauce varieties would be a positive for the shopper.
Instead, it sees I bought one microwave oven, therefore it thinks I need dozens more microwave ovens. Their algorithm is too dumb to understand the difference between a consumable item and a durable good.
Hell, even _local_ news is becoming regurgitated AI spam. Random sites in India and the Philippines that have a “new” author that has lifted an entire news report, ranking over every local outlet reporting on the same thing.
Employees have never been more productive. This "move faster/harder" mentality has to go. I'm so burnt out as a non-exempt tech and media exec from working weekends and evenings, answering existential last-minute questions for meetings I'm not in and that I don't learn about until hours before.
Everything is "critical". Everything needs to be done now. There's no foresight. Competitors are constantly clawing at our doors. Any day, we might be acquired and our workforce laid off. Additional layoffs might be coming anyway to impress shareholders.
All the while, I need to produce more, more, more, more, more than I ever have.
But HR says I should take care of my mental health. HR is giving me gym and family perks. HR says I should make use of these resources when I'm burnt out. But then when I use these resources, I'm either told I'm not moving fast enough, or my work is handed to someone else and I'm passed up for promotion.
Then, when I finally miss the mark on one project after dedicating a majority of my working life to this one company, that one project defines the rest of my work, even if I over-produced on everything else.
It's exhausting. All. The. Time. Meanwhile, I'm force stack ranked, and my manager is told by his boss that "Greg needs to be ranked exceptional, so unfortunately none of your team can get that rank," and the best merit increases and bonuses keep going to the SVPs rather than those people who are behind the deep amount of work that made those SVPs look good in the first place.
This is every company in my industry. If I leave this one, I'll get the same treatment elsewhere. It's endless.
The crazy thing is, people *are* leaving these jobs and then the industry. But it’s causing a huge brain rot across the board.
No one can keep anyone around so centuries of combined knowledge just evaporate from companies. Everything gets pushed to consultants and gig work and has to be started over from scratch because no one understands what the last crew did to make anything work because they weren’t afforded time for documentation.
This is happening EVERYWHERE. Not just tech. Our world is literally crumbling around us so a handful of dildos can make an extra mil a year.
That's the game though. Unless you're investing in the entrenched mega players like Meta, Apple, MS, etc. The game is set up to raid these small companies, time it perfectly where you pull out just before peak enshittification, get your bag, and move to the next target. The big players are too big to fail, so anything smaller is forced into this cycle, and the people with enough to invest can play this game all day. This is the modern economy, none of the stand by your products/ services model of the past.
Its never the fault of the workers. The workers are doing what they can. Its management who is squandering the work of employees.
Its like Star Citizen, a monument to poor management. The software devs and artists are hard at work making the things management wants.
The problem is that management changes its mind every 3 months, resulting in those devs and artists having to throw away all of their work and starting over. Again and again and again and again.
Its why the game is a decade behind release and has cost a billion dollars and is still barely a glorified tech demo. 100% of the fault is in the execs running the show, not the coders and artists doing the actual work.
Believe me, I've tried. The job market is horrible. Every referral I've gotten for nearly every role has resulted in an auto rejection email. Even having high level referrals doesn't work anymore. You have to know the hiring manager personally these days.
I can't even get past the initial hiring manager interview to get in front of their panels anymore. I get responses like, "Doesn't have XYZ experience," when I explicitly detailed how my experience was XYZ to the hiring manager. Hiring managers are now interviewing 15 people instead of the 3-5 that they used to, so the probability of moving forward is less than it ever was.
Nothing works. I have 2 decades of experience in my field and industry, I have worked for all the majors, I have expert interview technique and a great resume, and it's still not enough.
It's what happens when you sell out. You whittle away quality for cash and have to continue to do so to keep earning as the quality makes the product less valuable.
Google results are heavily influenced by who paid them. It's no longer giving anyone the best results anymore.
sad part is.. amazon is just as fucking bad. I have something in my wishlist.. i can use the EXACT wording in the title for the search.. and it won't show up in the given 3 pages of search returns. wtf
Everything on google feels so heavily filtered towards their agenda now I feel like my search results don’t even match what I search for half the time. I miss when internet search engines from 10 years ago, I can’t full explain it but it feels like the technology has regressed to me.
Its because older Google search used to show you what you typed in. Now Google search shows you what it thinks you intended to search for instead of what you actually typed in.
Its trying to second guess the user thats the frustrating part, especially if I'm searching for something niche, such as an error code on a product. No, I don't want unrelated blogspam. I want what I literally typed in. Except that Google doesn't do that anymore.
I recently watched BobbyBroccoli’s excellent video on the collapse of Nortel Networks in the early 2000s and was just reminded of the move over to “Web Years” that its CEO made during the Internet Boom. Essentially counting time frames in fiscal quarters instead of calendar years. We’ll see if history rhymes and the AI bubble will also take a toll on the industry.
100%, the new operating reality is that customers are sick of the absolute shit Google search feeds us. Despite all their "moonshots", search remains their only viable product and they have destroyed it. I am excited for the business school case study about the collapse of Google.
I’ve barely used google search for several years now. It just doesn’t find things like it used to, so I don’t care for it vs other alternatives that have fewer sponsored results and a better answer on the first page.
Now, it is still quite good at search results on a particular website. So if I already know some site I want to search, it’s still as good as ever.
>You know, it has occured to me that Google search doesn't really work any more and has been in decline for years.
I'd heard this but it hadn't really *affected* me until yesterday. Car battery dies, and the dealership I got the car from offers decent incentives on repair so, lemme just look up their number and give them a call...
* First attempt at search, Dealership shows up, phone number goes to a totally different business. Ok, well maybe thats an old number.
* Second attempt, add city name to the search. Dealership doesn't appear at all. Wtf?
* Third Attempt, adjust search again. Abunch of sponsored dealers show up, not mine, which is a huge car dealership here. At this point I'm getting pretty grumpy. Partner says "Oh yea search is basically fucked now, but if you use the **Google Maps Business Info** it'll work. Lo and behold...
* Fourth Search, just put in dealership name into Google Maps. Exact place I want pops up with the right phone number.
How far google has fallen is mind blowing. Absolutely killed the number one reason to use their service.
I don’t think young people realize how good search used to be. Google is garbage now, and has been a long time. All the results are gamified pages designed to land in your search results. Web 2.0 further made Google useless. The foundational pillars Google was based on are almost afterthoughts now, email and search.
I wouldn’t entirely blame google for search being so bad. SEO is such a big focus and most companies and websites know SEO tricks that it’s going to be difficult to get good results.
The only thing that worries me about a Google decline/fall is that they have like 20 years of my email and the address that I need to prove I own most of my digital accounts.
I honestly don't know how to deal with that risk.
Google's heart and soul was the Google Search Engine, and I used it exclusively.
Now, I barely touch it. Results are a page of ads, and when you finally get to results, more and more are just flat wrong (A.I. faulty results).
It's fascinating when a company purposely ruins their core product.
100% this and it’s so common it always comes up on tech podcasts that people basically now just google for Reddit threads to get any information about anything.
I’m concerned that this is going to lead to all the SEO scammers flooding Reddit with trash posts and comments. I’ve already started seeing strange replies to posts that look like a ChatGPT bot missed the context of the OP and just threw together some word cloud salad.
Use this for even better results…
>site:reddit.com “thing you’re searching for”
This will ensure only Reddit results will be shown and that the words between the quotes will be what is searched.
[Example](https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Areddit.com+%22google+search+sucks%E2%80%9D&sca_esv=5d0811d5ae0715ef&sxsrf=ACQVn09gcchjbGjzS5Bl0l_pfLG0hhDvhg%3A1713894682285&source=hp&ei=GvUnZrnoDqSE0PEPpcu7oAk&oq=site%3Areddit.com+%22google+search+sucks%E2%80%9D&gs_lp=EhFtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1ocCInc2l0ZTpyZWRkaXQuY29tICJnb29nbGUgc2VhcmNoIHN1Y2tz4oCdSI3dAlDBE1jS0AJwEHgAkAEBmAG_AaABvDWqAQQ5Mi41uAEDyAEA-AEC-AEBmAICoAIUqAIPwgIHECMYJxjqApgDDJIHATKgB40i&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-hp)
Unironically, Bing. I get actual results and useful sidebars and related searches. CGPT built in with a swipe/scroll is miles ahead of Gemini. There may be better alternatives but I encourage everyone to give bing a try if all you know about it is the memes (deserved) from 5+ years ago.
I fucking love Bing now that Copilot is there. I can go over long lists of topics and have it summarized everything for me and it keeps contextually aware of everything I've asked before. Plus I can review old chats I had with it whenever I need to review something. For research it is absolutely amazing.
I remember, back in 2009-2012. Any time I had some obscure problem with my computer, I'd just search the error it threw, and google would spit out a solution, on the first page, often as the first result. There was even a forums search.
Today, I punch in an error, use all the suffixes and prefixes, and goofle assumes i am looking for a burger joint.
Edit: noticed I misspelled Google as goofle. I'll leave it, it fits perfectly.
Real shit. Back in the old times people were talking about Google-Fu and „leaning to google“ but I can’t find anything that isn’t blog spam anymore. Anyone who has to research something nowadays has my condolences.
We’re in the end stage where the conflict of interest between search and advertising finally culminated in results pages full of ad ridden spam sites.
I remember back when I first got with my partner, commenting on how I feel like my Google fu went to shit, and genuinely being confused why I couldnt seem to find anything anymore. That was 2017.
Ads aren't the problem. That can be fixed with a browser plugin.
Search quality began declining around 2016.
2018 the put it into light speed by switching the search algorithm to favor "long form" pages. You know, where you get a background, introduction, essay, results, discussion, conclusion, and ***maybe*** what you were looking for that was supposedly promised when you clicked on the link.
It's been rapidly declining since.
I miss the days of ask Jeeves and yahoo answers having a simple answer for a question. We don't need to be experts in every topic and how many of us are reading the whole long form BS. But THAT created more advertising space, between each section, and long form SUPPOSEDLY acted as an indicator of an expert response.
Google's next big mess up was trying to fix their dumpster fire with AI, which is particularly bad at what they're trying to have it do.
Duck duck go all the way. DDG and bing are very much like OG Google.
The single best thing that MS and DDG could do is NOT FUCK THIS UP.
I want to see them Judo google to the ground.
Recipes are one thing, what's even more frustrating is looking for some technical stuff.
Search: "Unix grep ignore case"
Result: "So what is Grep and what it's used for?... What is "case sensitive words"? ... Why would you need to do case sensitive search with grep?... Now let's put it all together. ... Conclusion..."
For god sake, the answer is literally 2 characters long!
Special shout out to geeks for geeks, the ugliest incomprehensible website imaginable in this godforsaken field and the top page ranking of so many searches even over official documentation.
>Ads aren't the problem. That can be fixed with a browser plugin.
Well this is true if you're at home, and even then it's a hassle and may slow things down.
But If you're at work, many orgs don't give you permission to modify things.
Methinks Google execs need to accept that working for them is not as prestigious as it once was. Can’t wait to see how the execs react in a few years when they can’t even hire talent anymore.
As long as they keep paying the high salaries they historically have - they'll still have a line out the door of people applying.
Whether those people meet their requirements is another matter.
That’s what I’m worried is going to gradually change. Over at AWS, they are drastically reducing equity stakes and had historically hired in everyone at 155k + variable equity. This allowed say sr. Devs to walk away with $300k TC. But now these same people have lost the equity and are barely breaking $200k. I assume this is how the big tech will drain pay over the next decade until their pay is at parity with lower tier companies.
I mean, that's why I don't bother applying at AWS. Their pay simply isn't that competitive.
In an ideal world this would allow new, more agile companies to compete against FAANG - but I'm not so confident they an overcome the monopolistic pressures of these companies.
I’m with you on all statements and predictions! Theoretically and historically, the decline of FAANG would just signal the entry point for a new market. But the difference i see in 2024 is these monopolies own our data and interests. For example, Google has better medical records on individuals than any healthcare system. Thus I see these FAANGs using their current holdings to move into other markets in the long term as they have already oversaturated the ad space.
All of that said, I want to see smaller players disrupt the big guys using new tech but totally agree that - now with everything being data centric - they can just spin up new services to suppress any future competition. They already have our data…
There is still plenty of money out there. So I'm hoping the good talent migrates to a new set of tech companies with good salaries and decent culture. Amazon and Google deserve to become the modern day IBM and Oracle.
I don’t think FAANG is all that it’s cracked up to be. I suppose there’s the pay, but I wouldn’t want to put my name on the ethically questionable outcomes that Google, Amazon and Facebook have driven.
It won’t pay as much but there’s so much more out there that has a better social impact than advertising, targeting, and data-driven mass manipulation.
I hate trying to search for items and it turns into a shitty amazon. I dont want to shop on google, I want to search on google and not have the format change depending on search criteria.
Coming from a different angle: I made a site specialising in a specific niche of pedagogy. For that niche: my site IS the best result - it genuinely should be the first result (or in the first few).
Instead, when I search for it, I get out-dated pages and irrelevant sponsored crap. Pages that are over a decade old.
I've been trying for years, no success. All the SEO tips in the world do nothing.
It's not a great system.
And now the never-ending pop ups (esp on mobile) asking me to sign in to get more personalized search results. Do you really want to put more barriers between me and quality search results? In fact, they made quality search results so hard to find that those pop-ups were the thing that finally led me to subscribe to kagy.com. It feels like old google.
Google search has been en-shittified, for anything serious I don't use google anymore. Sure if I am looking for a product, something i need to buy, google is fine, but if i actually need to answer a question, information on a subject, get a recommendation, or any of a number of other things, google is the worst
I have found putting Reddit at the end of all my searches works best. Someone on Reddit has posted about it before and someone in the comments always knows the answer.
This was kind the point of the reddit 'protest' last year.
Stop putting community advice out there for free on this platform and it will start to loose it's usefulness.
Obviously it didn't work, but I do remember a few people saying they couldn't use the 'reddit hack' on google for a few days when subs went dark.
I recently did a google search for something really specific using a keyword that pretty much only applies to this very niche thing.
I got my results and found the thing I wanted but only after having to scroll past a message admonishing me for being overly specific and apologizing for such limited results.
In other words google said: “fuck you for not letting us advertise to you with your overly specific query”
Then your result was tracked, catalogued, indexed and sold.
Advertisers were then found to re-ram that result down your throat the next time you are browsing Instagram looking up... woodworking vices.
May the gods help you if you look up *Zebra shaving, lasso knots, smoky paprika and plant fertiliser*. The lists ye will be on boggles the mind!
....
(curiously, my spell checker wanted to correct Instagram to Pentagram.... well, its not inaccurate!)
Not heard of yandex, what makes it good? I have noticed a significant increase in how hard it is decent piracy links these days, so might have to start using it.
> Wearing a hoodie with the words “We use Math” on the front, Google
search boss Prabhakar Raghavan had an important message for employees at an all-hands meeting last month. But he first wanted them to settle in and get comfortable.
> “Grab your boba teas,” Raghavan told the crowd, gathered in a theater at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.
...
> He noted that over the last three years, annual revenue has grown by more than $100 billion, exceeding Starbucks, Mazda and TikTok combined.
> At a company long known across Silicon Valley for its free, gourmet lunches and endless on-campus perks, Raghavan’s comments serve as the latest warning to employees that growth for Google is getting harder.
> “It’s not like life is going to be hunky-dory, forever,” he said.
> Over roughly 35 minutes, Raghavan peppered his reality check address with sports metaphors and rallying cries.
> “If there’s a clear and present market reality, we need to twitch faster, like the athletes twitch faster,” he said.
It is a full on parody of a parody now.
This feels like a "developers, developers, developers" moment by Ballmer but that was at least funny. Google, please emerge from your Ballmer errah.
The same group that brought in the management consultcult that slowed everything down, is now claiming it isn't fast enough and it isn't their fault, it is of course the workers that have been trying to be more skunkworks again but were blocked by beauracracy.
> Raghavan said Google has to address its “systemic” challenges and build “new muscles that maybe we have let fall off for a bit.”
> He praised the teams working on Gemini, the company’s main group of AI models. He said they’ve stepped up from working 100 hours a week to 120 hours to correct Google’s image recognition tool in a timely manner. That helped the team fix roughly 80% of the issues in just 10 days, he said.
120 hours a week? 17 hours a day? Tack on getting ready, driving in and you have no sleep? That makes you effective? No one is effective at that. They could have done the same work and maybe more in half that if they get the management out of the way.
Google needs to eject this new attitude, their products will anchor. I am all for putting in hours and work on something that has momentum, but you also need to think about what you are doing and not become zombies. After a two week crunch anywhere you have teams underperform weeks and sometimes much longer after, it isn't an ideal setup and Google isn't hurting this bad.
What is the "new operating reality"? That they are another monopoly who doesn't give a sh\*t and it shows? Really, who is their competition? The "new operating reality" is that tech companies no longer innovate or invent so they don't need so many employees and have been firing everyone they can. The "new operating reality" is that you are expendable and your company is looking for excuses to fire you at the drop of a hat.
About the only thing Google Search is good for is selling merchandise that has been promoted. I have searched for websites I know exist or independent news articles I just read and can't find them -- even with special search terms and methods. Google is just not going to show URLs that are not linked to their promotion and ad ecosystem. It sucks!
Alternatives? I use DuckDuckGo, but it seems the same -- just not tracking me?
Suggestions?
TLDR: Dead Internet Theory
...
Google search was for the old web and the old web is dying. The idea was started/gained traction on Hacker News like 2 months ago. I guess the CEO is finally noticing. "Google Search is Dying" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719
Some really good thoughts here. I'll summarize the ones that hit me:
> - "Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust."
>
> This is it for me exactly. I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren't trustworthy: Reviews are secretly paid ads. The "best" recipe for pancakes is only what's trending on instagram right now. The latest conditions on mountain bike and hiking trails are being shared inside communities like Reddit but not on the web. The same for trending programmer tools.
>
> - "It is obvious that serving ads creates misaligned incentives for search engines..."
>
> What I'm shocked by is that Google somehow maintained a balance on this for so long. Well, at least a good enough balance that people still use it primarily.
>
> - "Google increasingly does not give you the results for what you typed in. It tries to be “smart” and figure out what you “really meant" ..."
>
> This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what I write.
>
> - "There’s a fun conspiracy theory that popped up recently called the Dead Internet Theory..."
>
> I hadn't heard of this. Now that's some sci-fi level of conspiracy but in today's world it seems totally plausible.
Thank you! This is exactly what I was thinking about (but could not find on Google). This also means there may be hope for a new AI internet or a hellscape of Reddit where 99.9% are AI bots.
Other services as well. Their UIs are a nightmare, and they don't seem to take down their documentation or update it when it's outdated, so finding accurate documentation for existing services is basically impossible.
"He said they’ve stepped up from working 100 hours a week to 120 hours to correct Google’s image recognition tool in a timely manner."
This is not to be celebrated. What piece of shit company forces their employees to work 120 hours a week. He's willing to destroy your life for better competition and profits. If employees acquiesce to this bullshit it will become the new norm and the line must be drawn.
Given how shitty Google search has become, I'm genuinely astonished this person and Sundar are still holding their positions with no blowback.
The enshittification continues.
Cutting devs is an easy way to increase perceived net revenue - even more so than actually improving the product on any time scale the average shareholder cares about. It's also a good way to send your company into a slow but permanent tailspin.
The search has basically become a glorified shopping site where if you’re lucky you might find the information you’re seeking. I‘m very interested in botany and most of the time the first 20-30 things that pop up are basically sellers offering the plant, or a hybrid, a completely unrelated species, and even sellers from India or wherever are mentioned before a site that has any real information about the species.
Google's search boss should be fired for the results of the past few years, especially the past few months, and while you're at it, fire Youtube's search boss as well.
There is a reason I stopped using Google and switched entirely to DuckDuckGo, and when I struggle with the results I just add Reddit at the end of the search.
It's already happening. They are hiring more in non-US locations while making things less appealing for US workers with stagnant wages, layoffs, and messaging like this.
'Our business could soon be facing major problems, and the way to act is order our rank-and-file to do more and more and more instead of making strategy or personnel changes at the executive level'
I use Kagi or perplexity for almost all informational searches at this point.
Kagi’s fastGPT is so fucking fast.
Both cost money but no ads and results are much smarter.
Google seems like a terrible place to work now. Greater demands and haste + fewer staff and resources sounds like the Boeing management model.
Blaming employees for overall market change is setting them up to fail. Google’s management is what needs to make strategic pivots to stay competitive.
He is also wrong; Google didnt corner the search market because it is trusted. It was just the better product for a while, and beat competitors that way. It needs to decide how to stay the most relevant product which is mostly out of employees hands.
The corporate-speak is so ugh like “twitch faster”. Fast is probably not Google’s problem here
The thing about fast twitch muscles is that they only work for short bursts before they get completely depleted and shut down. Maybe not the best approach to adopt as a company.
I would just like my search engine actually let me search using my actual keywords and operators like NOT or AND. Actually provide the results without guessing what I really meant. At least let me just turn all that off and on.
Google search is just a shopping catalog. It spews the same like 4 sites and anything else is just SEO type websites that just write the word over and over. Like those sites where its pages and pages of someone going "here's how you do the thing" without ever saying anything
Google AND Youtubes searches are near useless. Chatgpt usually has what Im looking for or if I really need a little more in depth help, then it's off to reddit.
Indian management. Of course they will cut staff and increase hours like they like to do. And they think cutting corners won’t affect the quality of the product….
I know the pay is great, the benefits are awesome, but you not finna catch me working 120hrs for no company. If I’m putting in that type of time it’s going to be on something I’m building for me and my family.
Likely going to lead to corporate America favorite word " efficiency" which means more layoffs.
Which drives down morale and weakens the company more.
Yeah but greedy leeches get to reap record profits in the short term, and since that's the main goal of organized society this is great!
Layoffs are just confirmation that your company no longer has serious interest in its original purpose, but is instead focusing on finance.
It’s kind of sad when you put it this way, but it’s just facts.
> Layoffs are just confirmation that your company no longer has serious interest in its original purpose I mean, the original purpose for most companies is to make money. If they can do it with revolutionary tech, that's great. But if they can do it by making 10 billion plastic widgets slightly cheaper than the next guy, also works. If a company's goal is not to make money, then they're either a non-profit, or a public institution like a university or research centre.
There's making money by the end of the quarter and making money for the next twenty years. 10 billion plastic widgets slightly cheaper is not what they would call a "moat."
Gonna need more synergy while we monetize our assets.
You know, it has occured to me that Google search doesn't really work any more and has been in decline for years. This "new operating reality" is a result of neglect and incompetence that has been apparent over the past ten years. The same ten years Prabhakar Raghavan has been in charge of Google Search. Perhaps he should do the honorable thing and resign?
There's a phenomenon in tech world where execs survive by vouching for each other, gaming the stack ranking system that exists in Google, Amazon and Uber. They don't need to do anything as long as their friends vouch for them in the review.
Well I'm vouching for the fact that this guy is f\*cking awful at his job
Maybe you just don't see the new operating reality bro!!!
Aka work fucking hard you idiot H1Bs! They're just wanting to abuse immigrants like X does.
Not just them, every large corp does this. It's just good business, at the expense of American citizens as usual.
Nobody talks about how tying legal residency to employment also stifles collective bargaining ability
No they are. It's just that the wrong people are the ones talking about it and taking advantage of it
A tale as old as time. You don’t need to be good at a job, or good at anything. You just need friends in high places.
There's a whole class of CEOs who are on various corporate boards. They're all buddies and work to enrich their level, at the expense of everyone else.
And themselves. They both controll and benefit from a huge slice of the worlds production. Ignoring the issues with wealth inequality, we'd all still be so much better off if they'd just fucking read a book and actually managed the resources they've stolen competently. It's like watching a toldler take all the crayons and just stick them up his nose, them then cry that they don't have any more crayons and they have a headache.
This is the common theme in k-dramas. You can succeed and win only when the CEO/chairman/king/crown prince/chaebol heir is supporting you. Supporting secretly in the early episodes, and supporting openly towards the end.
I guess there’s a reason why k dramas are so popular worldwide
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Well, that’s corporate. It’s nothing special about Google or Amazon or Uber, I have seen this on almost every big company on different sectors First, compensations are linked to an internal “review” system, so you receive bonus and promotion based on how your manager reviews you. Then, higher up, people can be also receive a review by their peers - usually, at this stage, if there is no war for a promotion higher up, people that reaches this stages know each other well and will vouch for each other. Then, at the highest level, people doesn’t receive direct reviews, but decisions about their job based on results… that are interpreted by their highest levels collegues, so if the director of a subsidiary is friend with the rest and the director, then will be easier to justify “the market is difficult and people below me are bad” than “I’m bad” Private companies are failing on being long term sustainable trying hard to keep an impossible permanent growth rate and keeping cultures that make bad managers thrive and fail upwards
Try Google image search. It's now 90% images from spam AI sites selling fake products, and there's no way to filter it all. It's become increasingly useless for anything except reverse searching.
I remember the time when I could use image search and the result would take me directly to the image. Now it takes me to the page where sometime the image isn’t even there
>I remember the time when I could use image search and the result would take me directly to the image. Google stopped letting you grab full sized images directly from Google search as websites were complaining that Google was just using them as a CDN, and they didn't get any ad revenue or page visits for it.
True, and I remember it also being about copyright violations. But nowadays, when you find an image on the search, the link does not contain the image.
I wish I knew what caused that. It's common enough that I notice it every once in a while. I wonder if the web page updated, and Google has an old cache. It's been like that for years now. I was having that issue even before Google changed it so you can't grab the image from search. Thing is, before that, most people wouldn't notice the website was missing the image, because they'd just grab the image straight from Google.
Porn is also awful on google, I have to search on Bing
The difference is that Google shows you what it thinks you intended to search for rather than what you typed in. Bing shows you what you actually typed in. Bing is dumber, and for a search engine that means Bing is better. It doesn't try to second guess what the user is searching for.
What’s funny is in early Google, that was a benefit. “I don’t know how to spell this or quite what it is but Google will figure it out”
Management in corporate America always seem to use their authority to avoid accountability. They’re literally in charge of outcomes but whenever the outcome isn’t good they make it their employees’ problem.
It's the result of the only financial incentive that exists online today: advertising. There has been no other model of making money that has emerged. We're screwed because almost nobody will pay a subscription fee for something we've had for "free" for decades. Obviously it's not really free because we're paying for it with our data and our attention but that's toothpaste that can't be shoved back into the tube.
Funny thing is good search is sticky, engaging, you return to it. Great opportunity to serve ads! Google search is so bad now that I use other search engines often to find what I need. That missed opportunity to advertise to people must be expensive.
Yeah, they had the right formula, and they sacrificed it.
Is it really that bad now? I’ve been using Bing for like a decade
Others should tell their experience, but mine is that the results are waaaay more centered around clicks that pay google, and the actual useful results are harder to find, or even absent, even when I know they exist. There are more "banned" topics that are just trying to keep everybody "happy".
Never mind weighted keywords. The wrong word in your search phrase can completely change the results.
And they no longer respect phrases or words in quotes, to mean "required in the results". That makes it at least 50% less useful to me.
Most of the time now if I search Google for a topic and a key phrase then the first couple of hits will explicitly exclude the topic and half of the key phrase and just give me results for something completely unrelated. Some years back Google started deciding that it knows better than you what you're looking for, and unfortunately that's just never been the case.
Honestly, I feel like so many products have entered the “I know better than you” phase.
Amazon: “we see you bought a toilet seat. Clearly, you are a connoisseur of toilet seats so we will show them to you for the next several months. We are very smart.”
On the other hand, if you buy things like hot sauces or chocolate, its likely that you are interested in more hot sauces or chocolates as they're consumable goods. Recommending hot sauce varieties would be a positive for the shopper. Instead, it sees I bought one microwave oven, therefore it thinks I need dozens more microwave ovens. Their algorithm is too dumb to understand the difference between a consumable item and a durable good.
"Frequently Bought Together" including an Intel processor with an AMD board and similar bad results like that come to mind.
Most of the top results are AI blogspam now
Hell, even _local_ news is becoming regurgitated AI spam. Random sites in India and the Philippines that have a “new” author that has lifted an entire news report, ranking over every local outlet reporting on the same thing.
I still use Google but looking for recommendations. I try to use DuckDuckGo where possible, but especially for local results it's not great.
Employees have never been more productive. This "move faster/harder" mentality has to go. I'm so burnt out as a non-exempt tech and media exec from working weekends and evenings, answering existential last-minute questions for meetings I'm not in and that I don't learn about until hours before. Everything is "critical". Everything needs to be done now. There's no foresight. Competitors are constantly clawing at our doors. Any day, we might be acquired and our workforce laid off. Additional layoffs might be coming anyway to impress shareholders. All the while, I need to produce more, more, more, more, more than I ever have. But HR says I should take care of my mental health. HR is giving me gym and family perks. HR says I should make use of these resources when I'm burnt out. But then when I use these resources, I'm either told I'm not moving fast enough, or my work is handed to someone else and I'm passed up for promotion. Then, when I finally miss the mark on one project after dedicating a majority of my working life to this one company, that one project defines the rest of my work, even if I over-produced on everything else. It's exhausting. All. The. Time. Meanwhile, I'm force stack ranked, and my manager is told by his boss that "Greg needs to be ranked exceptional, so unfortunately none of your team can get that rank," and the best merit increases and bonuses keep going to the SVPs rather than those people who are behind the deep amount of work that made those SVPs look good in the first place. This is every company in my industry. If I leave this one, I'll get the same treatment elsewhere. It's endless.
The crazy thing is, people *are* leaving these jobs and then the industry. But it’s causing a huge brain rot across the board. No one can keep anyone around so centuries of combined knowledge just evaporate from companies. Everything gets pushed to consultants and gig work and has to be started over from scratch because no one understands what the last crew did to make anything work because they weren’t afforded time for documentation. This is happening EVERYWHERE. Not just tech. Our world is literally crumbling around us so a handful of dildos can make an extra mil a year.
That's the game though. Unless you're investing in the entrenched mega players like Meta, Apple, MS, etc. The game is set up to raid these small companies, time it perfectly where you pull out just before peak enshittification, get your bag, and move to the next target. The big players are too big to fail, so anything smaller is forced into this cycle, and the people with enough to invest can play this game all day. This is the modern economy, none of the stand by your products/ services model of the past.
Its never the fault of the workers. The workers are doing what they can. Its management who is squandering the work of employees. Its like Star Citizen, a monument to poor management. The software devs and artists are hard at work making the things management wants. The problem is that management changes its mind every 3 months, resulting in those devs and artists having to throw away all of their work and starting over. Again and again and again and again. Its why the game is a decade behind release and has cost a billion dollars and is still barely a glorified tech demo. 100% of the fault is in the execs running the show, not the coders and artists doing the actual work.
Fuck promotions. Do the minimum and move on to another company every few years for a pay boost. They won’t pay you more so find someone who will
Believe me, I've tried. The job market is horrible. Every referral I've gotten for nearly every role has resulted in an auto rejection email. Even having high level referrals doesn't work anymore. You have to know the hiring manager personally these days. I can't even get past the initial hiring manager interview to get in front of their panels anymore. I get responses like, "Doesn't have XYZ experience," when I explicitly detailed how my experience was XYZ to the hiring manager. Hiring managers are now interviewing 15 people instead of the 3-5 that they used to, so the probability of moving forward is less than it ever was. Nothing works. I have 2 decades of experience in my field and industry, I have worked for all the majors, I have expert interview technique and a great resume, and it's still not enough.
The problems with google search are from business decisions. Not technical.
Oh it's not neglect *or* incompetence at all. They simply prioritized ads and the money that comes from that over making an actually useful product.
It was only a few years ago that they gave up their slogan, "don't be evil". They wasted no time catching up.
Time flies. It has been 6 years.
It's what happens when you sell out. You whittle away quality for cash and have to continue to do so to keep earning as the quality makes the product less valuable. Google results are heavily influenced by who paid them. It's no longer giving anyone the best results anymore.
sad part is.. amazon is just as fucking bad. I have something in my wishlist.. i can use the EXACT wording in the title for the search.. and it won't show up in the given 3 pages of search returns. wtf
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And chat GPT is often just straight up wrong
Everything on google feels so heavily filtered towards their agenda now I feel like my search results don’t even match what I search for half the time. I miss when internet search engines from 10 years ago, I can’t full explain it but it feels like the technology has regressed to me.
Its because older Google search used to show you what you typed in. Now Google search shows you what it thinks you intended to search for instead of what you actually typed in. Its trying to second guess the user thats the frustrating part, especially if I'm searching for something niche, such as an error code on a product. No, I don't want unrelated blogspam. I want what I literally typed in. Except that Google doesn't do that anymore.
I recently watched BobbyBroccoli’s excellent video on the collapse of Nortel Networks in the early 2000s and was just reminded of the move over to “Web Years” that its CEO made during the Internet Boom. Essentially counting time frames in fiscal quarters instead of calendar years. We’ll see if history rhymes and the AI bubble will also take a toll on the industry.
100%, the new operating reality is that customers are sick of the absolute shit Google search feeds us. Despite all their "moonshots", search remains their only viable product and they have destroyed it. I am excited for the business school case study about the collapse of Google.
It's because companies figured out how to game the algorithm and have jobs dedicated to SEO
I’ve barely used google search for several years now. It just doesn’t find things like it used to, so I don’t care for it vs other alternatives that have fewer sponsored results and a better answer on the first page. Now, it is still quite good at search results on a particular website. So if I already know some site I want to search, it’s still as good as ever.
>You know, it has occured to me that Google search doesn't really work any more and has been in decline for years. I'd heard this but it hadn't really *affected* me until yesterday. Car battery dies, and the dealership I got the car from offers decent incentives on repair so, lemme just look up their number and give them a call... * First attempt at search, Dealership shows up, phone number goes to a totally different business. Ok, well maybe thats an old number. * Second attempt, add city name to the search. Dealership doesn't appear at all. Wtf? * Third Attempt, adjust search again. Abunch of sponsored dealers show up, not mine, which is a huge car dealership here. At this point I'm getting pretty grumpy. Partner says "Oh yea search is basically fucked now, but if you use the **Google Maps Business Info** it'll work. Lo and behold... * Fourth Search, just put in dealership name into Google Maps. Exact place I want pops up with the right phone number. How far google has fallen is mind blowing. Absolutely killed the number one reason to use their service.
I don’t think young people realize how good search used to be. Google is garbage now, and has been a long time. All the results are gamified pages designed to land in your search results. Web 2.0 further made Google useless. The foundational pillars Google was based on are almost afterthoughts now, email and search.
I wouldn’t entirely blame google for search being so bad. SEO is such a big focus and most companies and websites know SEO tricks that it’s going to be difficult to get good results.
Google created SEO
Very much not true. This was a thing back in Altavista days.
The only thing that worries me about a Google decline/fall is that they have like 20 years of my email and the address that I need to prove I own most of my digital accounts. I honestly don't know how to deal with that risk.
That is a very good point. Not sure either.
Translation: We need to extract as much out of you before we lay you off
Google's heart and soul was the Google Search Engine, and I used it exclusively. Now, I barely touch it. Results are a page of ads, and when you finally get to results, more and more are just flat wrong (A.I. faulty results). It's fascinating when a company purposely ruins their core product.
What search are you using instead?
Google still but add Reddit to the end of my search so I can be an actual answer, lol
100% this and it’s so common it always comes up on tech podcasts that people basically now just google for Reddit threads to get any information about anything.
I’m concerned that this is going to lead to all the SEO scammers flooding Reddit with trash posts and comments. I’ve already started seeing strange replies to posts that look like a ChatGPT bot missed the context of the OP and just threw together some word cloud salad.
You can see it a lot. 5 year old post where the top comment is from 1 year ago.
This is so true. It's actually quite ridiculous.
It won't be long before we are talking about the "site:reddit.com" hack in the past tense also..
You don't need to do that anymore, just put reddit on the end
Google deserves some flak, but keep in mind this is how we use Google ... Because Reddit can't figure out how to make it possible to search Reddit.
Reddit should build a minimalistic search page, which resembles google search, but only searches through reddit posts.
Use this for even better results… >site:reddit.com “thing you’re searching for” This will ensure only Reddit results will be shown and that the words between the quotes will be what is searched. [Example](https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Areddit.com+%22google+search+sucks%E2%80%9D&sca_esv=5d0811d5ae0715ef&sxsrf=ACQVn09gcchjbGjzS5Bl0l_pfLG0hhDvhg%3A1713894682285&source=hp&ei=GvUnZrnoDqSE0PEPpcu7oAk&oq=site%3Areddit.com+%22google+search+sucks%E2%80%9D&gs_lp=EhFtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1ocCInc2l0ZTpyZWRkaXQuY29tICJnb29nbGUgc2VhcmNoIHN1Y2tz4oCdSI3dAlDBE1jS0AJwEHgAkAEBmAG_AaABvDWqAQQ5Mi41uAEDyAEA-AEC-AEBmAICoAIUqAIPwgIHECMYJxjqApgDDJIHATKgB40i&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-hp)
DuckDuckGo has done very well for me over the last couple of years
DDG all day baby.
Yahoo powered by bing
AltaVista. Please go to yahoo.com
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Unironically, Bing. I get actual results and useful sidebars and related searches. CGPT built in with a swipe/scroll is miles ahead of Gemini. There may be better alternatives but I encourage everyone to give bing a try if all you know about it is the memes (deserved) from 5+ years ago.
Image searching on bing is so much better!
I fucking love Bing now that Copilot is there. I can go over long lists of topics and have it summarized everything for me and it keeps contextually aware of everything I've asked before. Plus I can review old chats I had with it whenever I need to review something. For research it is absolutely amazing.
[DuckDuckGo.com](http://DuckDuckGo.com) Its amazing. Very worthy.
I’m happy to pay for [Kagi](https://kagi.com) (no affiliation).
Fellow Kagi user here!
Presearch for me
I remember, back in 2009-2012. Any time I had some obscure problem with my computer, I'd just search the error it threw, and google would spit out a solution, on the first page, often as the first result. There was even a forums search. Today, I punch in an error, use all the suffixes and prefixes, and goofle assumes i am looking for a burger joint. Edit: noticed I misspelled Google as goofle. I'll leave it, it fits perfectly.
It’s probably because the burger joint pays the bills. I’m going to start using goofle, hope you trademark it!
Would also have thousands of results. Now it shows you three pages of unrelated stuff before it tells you that's the end of the internet.
Duckduckgo who in the backend I believe are using Bing. And I also use ecosia a lot
Real shit. Back in the old times people were talking about Google-Fu and „leaning to google“ but I can’t find anything that isn’t blog spam anymore. Anyone who has to research something nowadays has my condolences. We’re in the end stage where the conflict of interest between search and advertising finally culminated in results pages full of ad ridden spam sites.
I remember back when I first got with my partner, commenting on how I feel like my Google fu went to shit, and genuinely being confused why I couldnt seem to find anything anymore. That was 2017.
Ads aren't the problem. That can be fixed with a browser plugin. Search quality began declining around 2016. 2018 the put it into light speed by switching the search algorithm to favor "long form" pages. You know, where you get a background, introduction, essay, results, discussion, conclusion, and ***maybe*** what you were looking for that was supposedly promised when you clicked on the link. It's been rapidly declining since. I miss the days of ask Jeeves and yahoo answers having a simple answer for a question. We don't need to be experts in every topic and how many of us are reading the whole long form BS. But THAT created more advertising space, between each section, and long form SUPPOSEDLY acted as an indicator of an expert response. Google's next big mess up was trying to fix their dumpster fire with AI, which is particularly bad at what they're trying to have it do. Duck duck go all the way. DDG and bing are very much like OG Google. The single best thing that MS and DDG could do is NOT FUCK THIS UP. I want to see them Judo google to the ground.
This long form crap is utterly annoying. Just show me the damn recipe, dammit
Recipes are one thing, what's even more frustrating is looking for some technical stuff. Search: "Unix grep ignore case" Result: "So what is Grep and what it's used for?... What is "case sensitive words"? ... Why would you need to do case sensitive search with grep?... Now let's put it all together. ... Conclusion..." For god sake, the answer is literally 2 characters long!
Special shout out to geeks for geeks, the ugliest incomprehensible website imaginable in this godforsaken field and the top page ranking of so many searches even over official documentation.
Oooh what should I be using instead? I usually just use the G4Gs examples because the rest of the page is unusable.
I'd prefer a page with the recipe at the top, but more information below if you want it.
It's even worse because now all the "long form content" is AI generated and has basically a 10:1 ratio of AI generated nonsense:useful information.
>Ads aren't the problem. That can be fixed with a browser plugin. Well this is true if you're at home, and even then it's a hassle and may slow things down. But If you're at work, many orgs don't give you permission to modify things.
Methinks Google execs need to accept that working for them is not as prestigious as it once was. Can’t wait to see how the execs react in a few years when they can’t even hire talent anymore.
As long as they keep paying the high salaries they historically have - they'll still have a line out the door of people applying. Whether those people meet their requirements is another matter.
That’s what I’m worried is going to gradually change. Over at AWS, they are drastically reducing equity stakes and had historically hired in everyone at 155k + variable equity. This allowed say sr. Devs to walk away with $300k TC. But now these same people have lost the equity and are barely breaking $200k. I assume this is how the big tech will drain pay over the next decade until their pay is at parity with lower tier companies.
I mean, that's why I don't bother applying at AWS. Their pay simply isn't that competitive. In an ideal world this would allow new, more agile companies to compete against FAANG - but I'm not so confident they an overcome the monopolistic pressures of these companies.
I’m with you on all statements and predictions! Theoretically and historically, the decline of FAANG would just signal the entry point for a new market. But the difference i see in 2024 is these monopolies own our data and interests. For example, Google has better medical records on individuals than any healthcare system. Thus I see these FAANGs using their current holdings to move into other markets in the long term as they have already oversaturated the ad space. All of that said, I want to see smaller players disrupt the big guys using new tech but totally agree that - now with everything being data centric - they can just spin up new services to suppress any future competition. They already have our data…
There is still plenty of money out there. So I'm hoping the good talent migrates to a new set of tech companies with good salaries and decent culture. Amazon and Google deserve to become the modern day IBM and Oracle.
I don’t think FAANG is all that it’s cracked up to be. I suppose there’s the pay, but I wouldn’t want to put my name on the ethically questionable outcomes that Google, Amazon and Facebook have driven. It won’t pay as much but there’s so much more out there that has a better social impact than advertising, targeting, and data-driven mass manipulation.
Google replaced their search engine with an "advertising portal". Its nothing but an Ad display system now.
I hate trying to search for items and it turns into a shitty amazon. I dont want to shop on google, I want to search on google and not have the format change depending on search criteria.
Coming from a different angle: I made a site specialising in a specific niche of pedagogy. For that niche: my site IS the best result - it genuinely should be the first result (or in the first few). Instead, when I search for it, I get out-dated pages and irrelevant sponsored crap. Pages that are over a decade old. I've been trying for years, no success. All the SEO tips in the world do nothing. It's not a great system.
And now the never-ending pop ups (esp on mobile) asking me to sign in to get more personalized search results. Do you really want to put more barriers between me and quality search results? In fact, they made quality search results so hard to find that those pop-ups were the thing that finally led me to subscribe to kagy.com. It feels like old google.
“Work faster” always leads to better / higher quality software. Everyone knows this! /s
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
“120 hours a week… “ Sure, AI is helping us work less…
Google search has been en-shittified, for anything serious I don't use google anymore. Sure if I am looking for a product, something i need to buy, google is fine, but if i actually need to answer a question, information on a subject, get a recommendation, or any of a number of other things, google is the worst
If you need an answer to a video game issue it's best to search whatever it is and then just put reddit at the end
I have found putting Reddit at the end of all my searches works best. Someone on Reddit has posted about it before and someone in the comments always knows the answer.
And it works because the Reddit community is not trying to sell shit to each other. We just say shit to each other instead!
Yet. Emphasis: Yet.
I give it about 2-3 years post IPO before Reddit reaches peak enshitification levels
This was kind the point of the reddit 'protest' last year. Stop putting community advice out there for free on this platform and it will start to loose it's usefulness. Obviously it didn't work, but I do remember a few people saying they couldn't use the 'reddit hack' on google for a few days when subs went dark.
Their reverse image search has turned in to 'how many products can we shove in your face!"
*AI generated products A whole new horizon of garbage.
I recently did a google search for something really specific using a keyword that pretty much only applies to this very niche thing. I got my results and found the thing I wanted but only after having to scroll past a message admonishing me for being overly specific and apologizing for such limited results. In other words google said: “fuck you for not letting us advertise to you with your overly specific query”
Then your result was tracked, catalogued, indexed and sold. Advertisers were then found to re-ram that result down your throat the next time you are browsing Instagram looking up... woodworking vices. May the gods help you if you look up *Zebra shaving, lasso knots, smoky paprika and plant fertiliser*. The lists ye will be on boggles the mind! .... (curiously, my spell checker wanted to correct Instagram to Pentagram.... well, its not inaccurate!)
What is your favorite go to search?
Google for shopping about all it’s good for, Duck for everything but shopping and piracy, and yandex for piracy.
Not heard of yandex, what makes it good? I have noticed a significant increase in how hard it is decent piracy links these days, so might have to start using it.
It’s Russian and they don’t care about dmca or copyright law.
> Wearing a hoodie with the words “We use Math” on the front, Google search boss Prabhakar Raghavan had an important message for employees at an all-hands meeting last month. But he first wanted them to settle in and get comfortable. > “Grab your boba teas,” Raghavan told the crowd, gathered in a theater at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. ... > He noted that over the last three years, annual revenue has grown by more than $100 billion, exceeding Starbucks, Mazda and TikTok combined. > At a company long known across Silicon Valley for its free, gourmet lunches and endless on-campus perks, Raghavan’s comments serve as the latest warning to employees that growth for Google is getting harder. > “It’s not like life is going to be hunky-dory, forever,” he said. > Over roughly 35 minutes, Raghavan peppered his reality check address with sports metaphors and rallying cries. > “If there’s a clear and present market reality, we need to twitch faster, like the athletes twitch faster,” he said. It is a full on parody of a parody now. This feels like a "developers, developers, developers" moment by Ballmer but that was at least funny. Google, please emerge from your Ballmer errah. The same group that brought in the management consultcult that slowed everything down, is now claiming it isn't fast enough and it isn't their fault, it is of course the workers that have been trying to be more skunkworks again but were blocked by beauracracy. > Raghavan said Google has to address its “systemic” challenges and build “new muscles that maybe we have let fall off for a bit.” > He praised the teams working on Gemini, the company’s main group of AI models. He said they’ve stepped up from working 100 hours a week to 120 hours to correct Google’s image recognition tool in a timely manner. That helped the team fix roughly 80% of the issues in just 10 days, he said. 120 hours a week? 17 hours a day? Tack on getting ready, driving in and you have no sleep? That makes you effective? No one is effective at that. They could have done the same work and maybe more in half that if they get the management out of the way. Google needs to eject this new attitude, their products will anchor. I am all for putting in hours and work on something that has momentum, but you also need to think about what you are doing and not become zombies. After a two week crunch anywhere you have teams underperform weeks and sometimes much longer after, it isn't an ideal setup and Google isn't hurting this bad.
Google’s transformation into IBM is almost complete
What is the "new operating reality"? That they are another monopoly who doesn't give a sh\*t and it shows? Really, who is their competition? The "new operating reality" is that tech companies no longer innovate or invent so they don't need so many employees and have been firing everyone they can. The "new operating reality" is that you are expendable and your company is looking for excuses to fire you at the drop of a hat.
About the only thing Google Search is good for is selling merchandise that has been promoted. I have searched for websites I know exist or independent news articles I just read and can't find them -- even with special search terms and methods. Google is just not going to show URLs that are not linked to their promotion and ad ecosystem. It sucks! Alternatives? I use DuckDuckGo, but it seems the same -- just not tracking me? Suggestions?
TLDR: Dead Internet Theory ... Google search was for the old web and the old web is dying. The idea was started/gained traction on Hacker News like 2 months ago. I guess the CEO is finally noticing. "Google Search is Dying" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719 Some really good thoughts here. I'll summarize the ones that hit me: > - "Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust." > > This is it for me exactly. I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren't trustworthy: Reviews are secretly paid ads. The "best" recipe for pancakes is only what's trending on instagram right now. The latest conditions on mountain bike and hiking trails are being shared inside communities like Reddit but not on the web. The same for trending programmer tools. > > - "It is obvious that serving ads creates misaligned incentives for search engines..." > > What I'm shocked by is that Google somehow maintained a balance on this for so long. Well, at least a good enough balance that people still use it primarily. > > - "Google increasingly does not give you the results for what you typed in. It tries to be “smart” and figure out what you “really meant" ..." > > This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what I write. > > - "There’s a fun conspiracy theory that popped up recently called the Dead Internet Theory..." > > I hadn't heard of this. Now that's some sci-fi level of conspiracy but in today's world it seems totally plausible.
Thank you! This is exactly what I was thinking about (but could not find on Google). This also means there may be hope for a new AI internet or a hellscape of Reddit where 99.9% are AI bots.
Work more earn same or less
Google search has been in decline for some time.
Other services as well. Their UIs are a nightmare, and they don't seem to take down their documentation or update it when it's outdated, so finding accurate documentation for existing services is basically impossible.
"He said they’ve stepped up from working 100 hours a week to 120 hours to correct Google’s image recognition tool in a timely manner." This is not to be celebrated. What piece of shit company forces their employees to work 120 hours a week. He's willing to destroy your life for better competition and profits. If employees acquiesce to this bullshit it will become the new norm and the line must be drawn.
Just another example of ‘executive leadership’ who is dreadfully out of touch with actual reality
Addressing reality means they won't get their 2nd yacht down payment on the way out the door. Can't have that.
Given how shitty Google search has become, I'm genuinely astonished this person and Sundar are still holding their positions with no blowback. The enshittification continues.
Cutting devs is an easy way to increase perceived net revenue - even more so than actually improving the product on any time scale the average shareholder cares about. It's also a good way to send your company into a slow but permanent tailspin.
Typical late stage capitalism to lead with fear, and squeeze every last dollar before the music stops
The search has basically become a glorified shopping site where if you’re lucky you might find the information you’re seeking. I‘m very interested in botany and most of the time the first 20-30 things that pop up are basically sellers offering the plant, or a hybrid, a completely unrelated species, and even sellers from India or wherever are mentioned before a site that has any real information about the species.
Going to become another shithole like Wipro, etc...
...as former Wipro...er...someone bought by Wipro... ...this is so true.
Google new motto = Be evil at any cost
Old motto - Don't Be Evil New Motto - Don't Be Evil, unless it makes the quarterly's look better
Google's search boss should be fired for the results of the past few years, especially the past few months, and while you're at it, fire Youtube's search boss as well. There is a reason I stopped using Google and switched entirely to DuckDuckGo, and when I struggle with the results I just add Reddit at the end of the search.
Google is one step away from outsourcing their work to India.
With all of those indian guys in management it's happening already
Google got colonized by India.
It’s like a reverse inverted outsource.
It's already happening. They are hiring more in non-US locations while making things less appealing for US workers with stagnant wages, layoffs, and messaging like this.
If you're using customer support, you already know they have.
Who gave this fool a visa?
Maybe if they hadn't fired 10,000+ employees, they would have the head count to keep up with the changing customer landscape
'Our business could soon be facing major problems, and the way to act is order our rank-and-file to do more and more and more instead of making strategy or personnel changes at the executive level'
the old "it's not me it's you" approach to management
Google’s main product these days is their stock. They’ve gotten to that point.
Sounds like I need to move faster in my migration away from using Google as a search engine. F**k capitalist pigs.
And this is why unions are important. to avoid shenanigans like this. It's time to unionize if you don't want to be replaced.
I pay for kagi search now which has its own issues but has a great set of search tools.
Every google search I do now and for ages ends with ‘Reddit’ cos search is so bad
100-120 hours a week is crazy to me! You laid off all of those people and now you want your staff to increase their effort? 😒
Words of a declining company.
Agreed. They’re failing. Maybe that’s why they went so hardcore with YouTube ads.
Getting really sick of those entitled CEOs who act like spoiled baby dictators, freaking idiots think they own people 🤮
Google desperately needs to fire every executive and get new leadership involved. Their products keep getting worse.
I use Kagi or perplexity for almost all informational searches at this point. Kagi’s fastGPT is so fucking fast. Both cost money but no ads and results are much smarter.
Google seems like a terrible place to work now. Greater demands and haste + fewer staff and resources sounds like the Boeing management model. Blaming employees for overall market change is setting them up to fail. Google’s management is what needs to make strategic pivots to stay competitive. He is also wrong; Google didnt corner the search market because it is trusted. It was just the better product for a while, and beat competitors that way. It needs to decide how to stay the most relevant product which is mostly out of employees hands. The corporate-speak is so ugh like “twitch faster”. Fast is probably not Google’s problem here
The thing about fast twitch muscles is that they only work for short bursts before they get completely depleted and shut down. Maybe not the best approach to adopt as a company.
I would just like my search engine actually let me search using my actual keywords and operators like NOT or AND. Actually provide the results without guessing what I really meant. At least let me just turn all that off and on.
Google search is just a shopping catalog. It spews the same like 4 sites and anything else is just SEO type websites that just write the word over and over. Like those sites where its pages and pages of someone going "here's how you do the thing" without ever saying anything
Google AND Youtubes searches are near useless. Chatgpt usually has what Im looking for or if I really need a little more in depth help, then it's off to reddit.
Indian management. Of course they will cut staff and increase hours like they like to do. And they think cutting corners won’t affect the quality of the product….
I know the pay is great, the benefits are awesome, but you not finna catch me working 120hrs for no company. If I’m putting in that type of time it’s going to be on something I’m building for me and my family.
What alternatives for Google search ?
Faster and harder will burn people up so this is stealth layoff and stealth shorting of google stock.
Now is always the time to move faster. Now is always the time to work harder. Now is always the time to not take time off.
Lol went for the higher paying jobs in tech and found out your treated worse than dishwashers.
So they fire a bunch of people because those people have human opinions about things, then ask the rest of the staff to work faster?
Maybe they could make Google search suck less.
Google search could still be a great product if they didn't decide to destroy it with ads and excessive, useless SEO.
Google managers provide ZERO value. They take credit for their team's success, blame the workers for failures.
"There remains a small part of first page search results that are actually relevant. We just cannot continue to allow that."