Better Offline - CZM Rewind: The Man That Destroyed Google Search

Episode Date: November 27, 2024

In this episode, Ed Zitron tells you the disgraceful story of how Prabhakar Raghavan, Google's former head of ads - led a coup so that he could run Google Search, and how an email chain from 2019 began a cascade of events that would lead to the outright decay of the most important website on the internet.  Original Air Date: 4.25.24 --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitronSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-I-Hart. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest,

SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Life is full of hurdles. So how do you keep going? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, from professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions about the challenges that shape them and the mindset that keeps them moving forward.

At our level, at this scale, being able to fail in front of the entire world, like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. I'm Michelle McPhee, and I've been unraveling the strangest criminal alliance I've ever reported on a Mormon polygamist and an Armenian businessman. Multimillion dollar house, Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets, a billion dollar fraud. But how long can this alliance last?

Tell me what you know. Is somebody coming after me? Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast's Superhuman documented it all,

embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the I-Hard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AllZone Media. Hi, Beth Rothline fans. It's me, your host, Ed Zittron.

here in America, it's Thanksgiving, so we're all given the week off. Robert and Sophie have told me I'm not allowed to podcast, and if they find out, they're going to once again put me in the carnival prison, and once again I was sent a low-quality JPEG of a gun by Robert. Unclear what it means. Nevertheless, this is one of my favorite episodes I've ever recorded. It's about a real shithead who destroyed a product I love, you love, and we both are doomed to use every day. Now, if you're not in America, and this is a big problem, I don't know what to tell you. The podcast is, cost doesn't cost you any money, unless of course you pay $5 a month for our Coolers-Zone media, in which case I apologize deeply. I will be sleeping not at all this week as penance

for what I've done to you. For the rest of you in America, no penance necessary. Please enjoy this episode. Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host at Zitron. And in the next two episodes, I'm going to tell you the names of some of the people responsible for destroying the internet. And I'm going to start on February 3, 3rd. 5th, 2019, when Ben Goems, Google's former head of search, well, he had a problem. Jerry Dishler, then the VP and GM of ads at Google and Shiv van Carterman, then the VP of Engineering Search and Ads on Google properties, had called something called a Code Yellow for Search Revenue due to,

and I quote emails that came out as part of Google's antitrust hearing, steady weakness in the daily numbers and a likelihoodness that it would end the quarter significantly behind in metrics that, kind of unclear. For those unfamiliar with Google's internal kind of Scientology-esque jargon, which means most people, let me explain. A code yellow isn't a terrible need to piss or some sort of crisis of moderate severity.

The yellow, according to Stephen Levy's teller book about Google, refers to, and I promise this is not a joke, the color of a tank top that a former VP of engineering called Wayne Rosling used to wear during his time at the company. It's essentially the equivalent of a defeccom. one and activates, as Levy explained, a war room-like situation where workers are pulled from their desks and into a conference room where they tackle the problem as a top priority. Any other projects or concerns are sidelined.

And independently, I've heard there are other colors like purple. I'm not going to get into that, though. It's quite boring and irrelevant to this situation. In emails released as part of the Department of Justice's antitrust case against Google, as I previously mentioned, Dishler laid out several contributing factors. Search query growth was significantly behind forecast, the timing of revenue launches was significantly behind, and he had this vague worry that several advertiser-specific and sector weaknesses existed in search. Now, I want to cover something because I've messed up, and I really want to be clear about this. I've previously and erroneously referred to the Code Yellow as something that Goams raised as a means of calling attention to the proximity of Google's ad side getting a little too close to search.

I'm afraid the truth is extremely depressing and so much grimmer. The code yellow was actually the rumble of the goddamn rot economy, with Google's revenue arm sounding the alarm that its golden goose wasn't laying enough eggs. Gomes, a Googler of 19 years that basically built the foundation of modern search engines, should go down as one of the few people in tech that actually fought for an actual principle, and he was destroyed by a guy called Prabaka Ragavan, a computer scientist class class that sided with the management consultancy sect. More confusingly, one of their problems was that there was insufficient growth in queries,

as in the amount of things that people were asking Google. It's a bit like if Ford decided that things were going poorly because their drivers weren't putting enough goddamn miles on their trucks. This whole story has personally upset me, and I think you're going to hear that in this, but going through these emails is just very depressing. Anyway, a few days beforehand on February 1st, 2019, Kristen Gill, then Google's VP Business Finance Officer, had emailed Shashi Thakur, then Google's VP of Engineering, Search and Discover, saying that the ads team had been considering a code yellow to close the search

gap it was seeing. Vaguely referring to how critical that growth was to an unnamed company plan. To be clear, this email was in response to Thakur stating that there is no. nothing that the search team could do to operate at the fidelity of growth that the ads department had demanded. Shashi forwarded the email to Goem's asking if there's any way to discuss this with Sundar Pashai, Google's CEO, and declared that there was no way he would sign up for a high fidelity business metric for daily active users on search. Thakir also said something that I've been thinking about constantly since I read these emails, that there was a good reason that Google's

founders separated search from ads. I want you to remember that line for later. A day later, on February 2nd, 2019, Thacker and Gomes shared their anxieties with Nick Fox, a vice president of Search and Google Assistant, entering a multiple day-long debate about Google's sudden lust for growth. This thread is a dark window into the world of growth-focused tech, where Thacker listed the multiple points of this connection between ads and search, discussing how the search team wasn't able to finally optimize engagement on Google without hacking it, a term that means effectively tricking users into spending more time on a site, and that doing so would lead them to, and I quote,

abandon work on efficient journeys. In one email, Fox adds that there was a pretty big disconnect between what finance and ads wants and what search was doing. Every part of this story pisses me off so much. When Goemes pushed back on the multiple requests for growth, Fox added that all three of them were responsible for search and that search was, and again I quote, the revenue engine of the company, and that bartering with the ads and finance teams was now potentially the new reality of their jobs. On February 6, 2019, Gohm said that he believed that search was getting too close to the money and ended his email by saying that he was concerned that growth is all that Google was thinking about. On March 22nd, 2019, Google VP of product management, Darshan Kantec, would declare the end of the Code Yellow. The thread mostly consisted of congratulatory emails until Goams made the mistake of responding, congratulating everyone,

saying that the plans architected as part of the Code Yellow would do well throughout the year. Enter Prabaka Ragavan, then Google's head of ads and the true mastermind behind the Code Yellow, who would respond curtly, saying that the current revenue, targets were addressed by heroic RPM engineering and that the core query softness continued without mitigation. A very clunky way of saying that despite these changes, query growth was not happening at the rate he needed it to. A day later, Goemes emailed Fox and Thakur at email he intended to send to Ragavam.

He led by saying that he was annoyed both personally and on behalf of the search team. In this very long email, he explained in arduous detail how one might increase its engagement with Google Search, but specifically added that they could increase queries quite easily in the short term, but only in user-negative ways, like turning off spell correction or ranking improvements, or placing refinements, effectively labels, all over the page, adding that it was possible that there are trade-offs here between the different kinds of user-negativity caused by engagement hacking, and that he was deeply, deeply uncomfortable with this. He also added that this was the reason he didn't believe that queries, as in them amount of

of the things with people searching on Google were a good metric to measure search, and that the best defense against the weaknesses of queries was to create compelling user experiences that make users want to come back. Crazy idea there. What if the product was good? Not good enough of Prabaka. So a little bit of history about Google here. They regularly throughout the year do core updates to search.

These are updates that change the algorithm that say, okay, we're going to suppress this kind of thing. can elevate this kind of thing. And they are actually the reason that search changes. It's why certain sites suddenly disappear or reappear. It's why sites get a ton of traffic, some don't get any, and so on and so forth. But they do a lot of them. The one that's really interesting, I mean, a little bastard, and I went and looked through

pretty much the last decade of these, the one that stood out to me was the March 2019 core update to search, which happened about a week before the end of the code yellow, meaning that it's very likely that this was a result of Prabhakas bullshit. So this was expected to be one of the largest updates to search in a very long time, and I'm quoting search engine journal there. Yet when it launched, many found that the update mostly rolled back changes, and traffic was increasing to sites that had been suppressed by previous updates like Google Search's Penguin Update from 2012 that specifically targeted spammy search results. There were others that were seeing traffic as well.

from an update that happened on the 1st of August 2018. That was a few months after Goemes became head of search. While I'm guessing here, I really don't know. I do not work for Google. I do not have friends there. I think the timing of the March 2019 core update, along with the trafficking increases to previously suppress sites that 100% were spammy, SEO nonsense,

I think these suggest that Google's response to the Code Yellow was to roll back changes that were made to maintain the quality of search. A few months later in May 2019, Google would roll out a redesign of how ads were shown on Google search, specifically on mobile, replacing the bright green ad label and URL color on ads with a tiny little bolded black note that said ad in the smallest font you could possibly put there, with the link looking otherwise identical to a regular search link. I guess that's how they managed to start hitting their numbers, huh? And then in January 2020, Google would bring this change to desktop, and the Verges' John, Some Porter would suggest that it made Google's ads look just like search results now.

Awesome. Five months later, a little over a year after the Code Yellow situation, Google would make Prabhakar Raghavan the head of Google Search, with Jerry Dishler taking his place as the head of ads. After nearly 20 years of building Google search, Gohoms would be relegated to the SVP of education at Google. Gohms, it was a critical part of the original team that made Google search work. who has been credited with establishing the culture of the world's largest and most important search engine was chased out by a growth-hungry managerial type.

Several of them, actually, led by Prabhakavam, a management consultant wearing an engineer costume. As a side note, by the way, I use the term management consultant there as a pejorative, while he exhibits all the same bean-counting morally unguided behaviours of a management consultant, from what I can tell, Ragavan has never actually worked in that particular sector of the economy. But you know who has? Sondar Pishai, the CEO of Google, who previously worked at McKinsey, arguably the most morally abhorrent company that's ever existed, having played roles both in the 2008 financial crisis, where it encouraged banks to load up on debt and flawed mortgage-backed

securities, and the ongoing opioid crisis, where it effectively advised Perju Farmer on how to growth-hack sales of Oxycontin, an extremely addictive painkiller. McKinsey has paid nearly $1 billion over several settlements due to its work with Purdue. But I'm getting sidetracked. But one last point. McKinsey is actively anti-labour. When a company brings in a McKinsey consultant, they're often there

to advise on how to cut costs, which inevitably means layoffs and outsourcing. McKinsey is to the middle class what flesh-eating bacteria is dey skin. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert

Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Bodenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriters, Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah.

Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion?

We're open. since you guys are middle-aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora.

And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com.

Life throws hurdles big and small. The question is, how do you conquer them? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we sit down with the most inspiring, women in sports and wellness. Professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions to talk about the challenges that shaped them and the mindset that keeps them going. From the WNBA standout, Kate Martin and rising hockey star Layla Edwards. If a boy can do it, I don't see why a girl can't. Like, I've never understood that. Like, it didn't make sense in my brain. It's hard to be in spaces that no one looks like you, but don't ever feel like you don't feel on. Don't let that be the reason

you don't do it. An Olympic champs Gabby Thomas and Katie Ledecki. The ability to show a gold medal to someone and have their face light up and smile. That means the world to me. And that's what motivates me to win more gold medals. At our level, at this scale, like being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Because resilience isn't just about winning.

It's about showing up, even when it's hard. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of I. I heart women's sports. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential.

Either way, the podcast's Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. A win is a win. A win is a win.

I don't care what I'm saying. Yep, that's me, Clifford Taylor the 4th. You might have seen the skits, the reactions, my journey from basketball to college football, or my career in sports media. Well, somewhere along the way, this platform became bigger than I ever imagined. And now I'm bringing all of that excitement

to my brand new podcast, The Clifford Show. This is a place for raw, unfiltered conversations with some of your favorite athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated. One week I'll take you behind the scenes of the biggest moments in sports and entertainment

and the next we'll talk about life, mental health, purpose, and even music. The Clifford Show isn't just a podcast, it's a space for honest conversations, stories that don't always get told, and for people who are chasing something bigger. So, if you've ever supported me or you're just chasing down a dream,

this is right where you need to be. Listen to the Clifford Show on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok Podcast Network on TikTok. But back to the emails, which are a stark example of the monstrous, disgusting rot economy, the growth at all-cost mindset that's dominating the tech ecosystem. And if you take one thing away from this episode, I want it to be the name Prabhakar Raghavan,

and an understanding that there are people responsible for the current state of the internet. These emails, which I really encourage you to look up, And if you go to where's your ed. At, you'll be able to see a newsletter that has links to them. Well, these emails tell a dramatic story about how Google's finance and advertising teams, led by Raghavan with the blessing of CEO Sundar Peshai, the McKinsey guy, actively work to make Google worse to make the company more money. This is exactly what I mean when I talk about the economy,

an illogical product-destroying mindset that turns products you love into torturous, frustrating quasi-tools that require you to fight. the company to get the thing you want. Ben Goames was instrumental in making search work, both as a product and a business. He joined the company in 1999, a time long before Google established dominance in the field, and the same year when Larry Page and Sergey Brin tried to sell the company to excite for $1 million, only to walk away after Vinod Kossler, an excite investor and co-founder of some microsystems that's now a VC who tried to stop people going to a beach in Half Moon Bay. Well, he tried to low-bush.

ball and with a $750,000 offer, also known as a 100-square-foot apartment in San Francisco. In an interview with Fast Company's Harry McCracken from 2018, Goemes frayed Google's challenge as taking the page-rank algorithm from one machine to a whole bunch of machines, and they weren't very good machines at the time. Despite his impact in tenure, Gohms had only been made head of search in the middle of 2018, after John Guenderea moved to Apple to work on its machine learning an AR strategy. Gomes had been described as Google's search czar beloved for his ability to communicate across Google's many quite decentralized departments.

Every single article I've read about Gomes and his tenure at Google spoke of a man deeply ingrained in the foundation of one of the most important technologies ever made, a man who had dedicated decades to maintaining a product with a, and I quote Gomes here, guiding light of serving the user and using technology. to do that. And when finally given the keys to the kingdom, the ability to elevate Google search even further, he was rat-fucked by a series of rotten careerists trying to please Wall Street, led by Prabhakar Raghavan. Do you want to know what Prabhakar Raghavan's old job was? What Prabhakar Raghavan, the new head of Google Search, the guy that ran Google Search that runs Google

search right now that is running Google search into the goddamn ground? Do you want to know what his job was, his job before Google? He was the head of search for God damn Yahoo! From 2005 through 2012, when he joined the company, when Prabhakar Vaghan took over Yahoo search, they held a 30.4% market share, not far from Google's own 36.9%, and miles ahead of the 15.7% that Microsoft's MSN search had. By May 2012, Yahoo was down to just 13.4% and had shrunk for the previous nine consecutive months and was being beaten by even the newly released Bing. That same year, Yahoo had the largest layoffs in its corporate history, shedding 2,000 employees or 14% of its overall workforce.

The man who deposed Ben Goams. Someone who worked on Google Search from its very beginnings was so shit at his job that in 2009, Yahoo effectively threw in the towel on its own search tech, instead choosing to license Bing's engine in a 10-year deal. If we take a long view of things, this likely precipitated the overall decline of the company, which went from being worth $125 billion at the peak, of the dot-com boom, to being sold to Verizon for $4.8 billion in 2017, which is roughly a 3,000 square foot apartment in San Francisco. With search no longer a priority in making less money for the company, Yahoo decided to pivot into Web 2.0 in original content,

making some bets that paid off, but far, far too many that did not. It spent $1.1 billion on Tumblr in 2013, only for Verizon to sell it for just $3 million in 2019. It bought Zimbra in 2007 ostensibly to complete with the new Google Apps productivity suite, only to sell it for a reported fraction of the original purchase priced a VMware a few years later. That's not his fault. But nevertheless, Yahoo was a company without a mission, a purpose or an objective. Nobody, and I'll speculate, even those leading the company, really knew what it was or what it did. Anyway, just a big shout out right now to Kara Swisher, who referred to Prabhakar as well-respected when he moved from Yahoo to Google.

You absolutely nailed it, Kara. Bang up job. In an interview with Zedinette Stan Farber from 2005, Ragavan spoke of his intent to align the commercial incentive of a billion content providers with social good intent while at Yahoo, and his eagerness to inspire the audience to give more data. What? Anyway, before that, it's actually hard to find out exactly what Raghavan did, though, according to ZDNet, he spent 14 years doing search and data mining research at IBM. Hmm.

In April 2011, the Guardian ran an interview with Raghavan that called him Yahoo's secret weapon, describing his plan to make rigorous scientific research and practice to inform Yahoo's business from email to advertising and how under then-CEO Carol Bartz, the focus had shifted to the direct development of new products. It speaks of Ragam's scientific approach and his steady, process-based logic to innovation that is very different to the common perception that ideas and development are more about luck and spontaneity. A sentence that I'm only reading to you because I really need you to hear how stupid it sounds and how specious some of the tech press used to be. Frankly, this entire article is ridiculous, so utterly vacuous that I'm actually astonished.

I don't want to name the reporter. I feel bad. What about Ragavans' career made this feel right? How has nobody connected these dots before? I have a day job. I run a PR firm. I am a blogger with a podcast. And I'm the one who said, yeah, okay, Dracula is now the CEO of the Blood Bank. Nobody saw this. Nobody saw this at the time. I just feel a bit crazy. I feel a bit crazy.

But to be clear, this was something written several years after Yahoo had licensed its search technology to Microsoft. In a financial deal, the next CEO, Marissa Mayer, who replaced Barts, was still angry about for years. Raghavans reign as what ZDNet referred to as the searchmaster was one so successful that it ended up being replaced by a search engine that not a single person in the world enjoys saying out loud. The Guardian article ran exactly one year before dramatic layoffs at Yahoo that involved firing entire divisions worth of people and four months before Carol Bartz would be fired by telephone by then chairman Roy Bostock.

Her replacement, Scott Thompson, who previously served as president of PayPal, would last a whole five months in the row before he was replaced by former Google. executive Marissa Mayer, in part because it emerged, he lied on his resume about having a computer science degree. Hey, Robocard, did you not notice? Anyway, whatever. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy? Not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk, to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

There's that worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right?

That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open to change. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smygel and friends on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Huber me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHart can extend your message to audiences across broadband. broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting.

Let us show you at IHeartadvertising.com. That's IHeartadvertising.com. Life throws hurdles big and small. The question is, how do you conquer them? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we sit down with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions to talk about the challenges that shaped them and the mindset that keeps them going. From the WNBA standout, Kate Martin, and rising hockey star Layla Edwards. If a boy can do it, I don't see why a girl can't. Like, I've never understood that. Like, it didn't make sense in my brain.

It's hard to be in spaces that no one looks like you, but don't ever feel like you don't belong. Don't let that be the reason you don't do it. An Olympic champs, Gabby Thomas, and Katie Ladeki. The ability to show a gold medal to someone and have their face light up and smile, that means the world to me. And that's what motivates me to win more gold medals.

At our level, at this scale, like being able to fail and fail, front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Because resilience isn't just about winning. It's about showing up, even when it's hard. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHart Women's Sports. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal, but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human Either way, the podcast, Superhuman, documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year.

Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the I-Hard radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A win is a win. A win is a win. Yep, that's me, Clipper Taylor the 4th. You might have seen the skits, the reactions, my journey from basketball. basketball to college football, or my career in sports media.

Well, somewhere along the way, this platform became bigger than I ever imagined. And now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifford Show. This is a place for raw, unfiltered conversations with some of your favorite athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated. One week, I'll take you behind the scenes of the biggest moments in sports and entertainment, and the next we'll talk about life, mental health, purpose, and even music. The Clifford Show isn't just a podcast. It's a space for honest conversations, stories that don't always get told,

and for people who are chasing something bigger. So, if you've ever supported me or you're just chasing down a dream, this is right where you need to be. Listen to the Clifford show on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok podcast network on TikTok. Barts joined Yahoo in 2009, so about four years into Brobacar's brain of terror, I guess. And she joined in the aftermath of its previous CEO, Jerry Yang,

refusing to sell the company to Microsoft for $45 billion. In her first year, she laid off hundreds of people and struck a deal, that I've mentioned before, to power Yahoo's search using Microsoft's Bing's search engine tech, with Microsoft paying Yahoo 88% of the revenue it gained from searches, a deal that made Yahoo a couple hundred million dollars for handing over the keys and the tech to its most high-traffic platform. As I previously stated when Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo's secret weapon, was doing his work, Yahoo's search was so valuable that it was replaced by Bing.

Its sole value, in fact, I mean, maybe I'm being a little unfair. There's a way of looking at this. You could say that Yahoo's entire value at the end of his career was driven by nostalgia in association with days before he worked there. Anyway, thanks to the state of modern search, it's actually very, very difficult to find much about Raghavan's history. It took me hours of digging through Google, and at one point being embarrassingly, to find three or four articles that went into any depth about him. But from what I've gleaned, his expertise lies primarily in failing upwards, ascending through the ranks of technology

on the momentum from the explosions he's caused. In a wired interview from 2021, Gladhandler Stephen Levy said Raghavan isn't the CEO of Google, he just runs the place, and described his addition to the company as a move from research to management. While Levy calls him a world-class computer scientist who has authored definitive texts in the field, which is true, he also describes Ragavan as choosing a management track, which definitely tracks with everything I found out about him. Raghavam proudly declares that Google's third-party ad tech plays a critical role in keeping journalism alive in a really shitty answer to a question that was also made at a time when

he was in aggressively incentivizing search engine optimized content, and a year-office after he deposed someone who actually gave a shit about search. Under Raghavan, Google has become less reliable, and is dominated by search engine optimization and just outright spam. And I've said this before, but look, we complain about the state of Twitter under Elon Musk, and justifiably, he's a vile anti-Semite racist, bigger. We all know this, it's fully true, we can say it a million times. However, I'd argue that Raghavan, by extension, Sondar Peshai, deserve

a hundred times more criticism. They've done unfathomable damage to society. You really can't fix the damage they've been doing and the damage they'll continue to do, especially as we go into an election. Raghavan and his cronies work to oust Ben Gohms, a man who dedicated a good portion of his life to making the world's information more accessible,

in the process burning the library of Alexandria to the goddamn ground so that Sondar Peshai could make more than $200 million a year. And Raghavan, a manager, high by Sundar Peshai, a former McKinsey man, the king of managers, is an example of everything wrong with the tech industry. Despite his history as a true computer scientist with actual academic credentials, Raghavan chose to bulldoze actual workers, people who did things and people that care about technology, and replaced them with horrifying toadies that would make Google more profitable and less useful.

Since Prabhakar took the reins of Google in 2020, Google search has dramatically declined, with these core search updates I mentioned allegedly made to improve the quality of results, having the adverse effect, increasing the prevalence of spammy, shitty search optimized content. It's frustrating. The anger you hear in my voice, the emotion is because I've read all of these antitrust emails. I have gone through this guy's history, and I've read all the things about Ben Goams too. Every article about Ben Goames where they interviewed is this guy just having these dreamy thoughts about the future of information and the complexity of delivering it at high speed. Every interview with Ragavan is some vague bullshit about how important data is.

It's so goddamn offensive to me. And all of this stuff happening is just one example of what I think are probably hundreds of things happening across startups, or that have happened across startups in the last 10 or 15 years, and big tech too. And it's because the people running the tech industry are no longer those who built it. Larry Page and Sergey Brin left Google in December 2019, the same year, by the way, as the Code Yellow thing. And while they remained as controlling shareholders, they clearly don't give a shit about what Google means anymore.

Propa Karagavan is a manager, and his career, from what I can tell, is mostly made up of, did some stuff at IBM, failed to make Yahoo anything of no, and fucked up Google so badly that every news outlet has run a story about how bad it is. This, this is the result of taking technology out of the hands of real builders and handing it to managers at a time when management is synonymous with staying as far away from actual work as possible. When you're a do-nothing looking to profit as much as possible, who doesn't use tech, who doesn't care about tech, and you only care about growth, well, you're not a user, you're a parasite, and it's these parasites that have dominated and are now draining the tech industry of its value.

They're driving it into a goddamn ditch. Ragamon's story is unique, insofar as the damage he's managed to inflict, or if we're being exceptionally charitable, failed to avoid in the case of Yahoo, on two industry-defining companies, and the fact that he did it without being a CEO or founder, is remarkable. Yet, he's far from the only example of a manager falling upwards. I'm going to editorialize a bit here. I want you to think about your job history.

I want you to think about the managers you've had. I've written a lot about management. And specifically to do with remote work and the whole thing around, guys who don't do work who are barely in the office telling you you need to be in the office. This problem is everywhere. Managers are everywhere. And managers aren't doing work. I'm sure someone will email me now and say,

well, I'm a manager. enough, I do work all the time. Yeah, mate, sure you do. That's why you're emailing me, telling me how good you are at your job. People who actually do work don't feel defensive about it. People who do things and are part of the actual profit center, they don't need a podcast to tell them they're good at their job. What I think the problem is in modern American corporate society is that management is no longer synonymous with actually managing people. It's not about getting the people what they need. It's not about organizing things and making things efficient and good. It's not about execution. It's about handing work off to other people and getting paid handsomely.

And if you disagree, easy at betteroffline.com. I will read your email, maybe I'll even respond. But the thing is, management has become a poison in America. Managers have become poisonous. Because managers are not actually held to any kind of standard. No, only the work who do the work are. What happened to Ben Goames is one of the most disgusting, disgraceful things to happen in the tech industry. It's an absolute joke. Ben Goems was a goddamn hero, and I really need you to read the newsletter and read these emails. I need you to see how many times him and Thacker, great guy as well, were saying, hey, growth is bad for search. The thing that Ben Goams was being asked to do was increase queries on Google, the literal amount that people search.

There are many ways of looking at that and thinking, oh shit, that's not what you want. Surely you don't want no queries. You don't want people not using it at all. But queries going upwards linearly suggests that if you're not magic it to user growth at least, that people are not getting what they want on the first try, which, by the way, kind of feels like how Google is nowadays. When you go to Google and the first result and the second result and the fifth result and the 10th result, just don't get what you need, because it's all SEO crap. Now, this is all theorizing, but what I think Prabagar Ragavan did was I think he took off

all the fucking guidelines on Google Search. I think he rolled back changes specifically to make search worse, to increase queries, to give Google more chance to show you adverts. I am guessing, don't have a source telling me this, but the pattern around the core search updates, the fact that Google Search started getting worse, toward the middle and end of 2019 and unquestionably dipped in 2020, well, that's when Prabhakar took over. That's when the big man took the reins. That's when Dracula got his job at the blood bank.

And this is the thing. There's very little that you and I can actually do about this, but what we can do is say names like Prabagar Ragavana, great deal of times, so that people like this can be known, so that the actions of these scurrilous assholes can be seen and heard and pointed at and spat upon. I'm not suggesting spitting on anyone, no violent acts, no, can be pissy on the internet like the rest of us. Now, I'm ranting, I realize I'm ranting, but this subject really, really got to me. But it's not the only one. In the next episode, I'm going to conclude this sordid three-part fiasco.

With a few more examples and how many of these managers, these bean counters, devoid of imagination or ability or anything of note, save for that utter slug-like ability to protect oneself, I want to talk about how these people manage to obfuscate their true intentions by pretending to be engineers, by pretending to be technologists and pretending to be innovators. I want to tell you all about how Adam Masseri destroyed Instagram. and I want to tell you how little Sam Altman has achieved other than making him and his friends rich. See you next time. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattosowski.com.

You can email me at easy at betteroffline.com or check out Better Offline.com to find out Better Offline.com to find you. my newsletter and more links to this podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com,

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