Better Offline - The Man That Destroyed Google Search

Episode Date: April 25, 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. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. Your 20s can be so exciting, but they can also be really overwhelming, confusing, and honestly, just kind of lonely. May is Mental Health Awareness Month and the psychology of your 20s is breaking down the science behind the biggest roadblocks we face.

I was six years into my career, the 80-hour weeks and just the first one in, the last one out, and I ended up burning out. There was a large chunk of my 20s that I was just so wanting to be out of that phase out of my skin and I just like really regret not living in the present more. You don't need to have everything figured out right now.

You just need to understand yourself a little bit better. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AllZone Media 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 5th, 2019, when Ben Gooms, 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 Antigrust 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 sort of crisis of moderate severity. The yellow, according to Stephen Levy's tell-all 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 Defcom 1 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 Goemes 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. Gohms, 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 Raghavan, a computer scientist class traitor 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 1, 2019, Kristen Gill, then Google's VP business finance officer, had emailed Shashi Thakur, then Google's VP of Engineering, Surgeon Discover, saying that the ad source of, team had been considering a code yellow to close the search gap it was seeing. Vagely 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 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 Goems, asking if there's any way to discuss this with Sundar Pashai, Google's CEO, and declared that there was no way he was. would sign up for a high fidelity business metric for daily active users on search. Thacker 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 Thakur listed the multiple points of disconnection 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 Kantak, 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 Thaker an 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 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 the amount 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 Prabhakar. So, a little bit of history about Google, 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, we 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 Goem's 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 rollback 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, add in the smallest font you could possibly put there, with the link looking otherwise I'd,

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 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, Ragavann, the head of Google search, with Jerry Dishler taking his place as the head of ads.

After nearly 20 years of building Google search, Goams would be relegated to the SVP of education at Google. Gomes, 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 Prabagov Rakovat, 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 behaviors 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? Sundar 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 Purdue 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 fleshy in bacteria is the skin. Another podcast from some SNL

late night comedy guy, not quite on humor 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 acapella

band with their between songs banter. There's the 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 ads 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 IHart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get

started. That's 844-8-4-4-I-Hart. agency, the ability to know that we're the experts in our own body. On the podcast cultivating her space, Dr. Dom and Terry Lomax create a space where black women can show up fully and be heard. I wholeheartedly think, you know, you hit 30, you shouldn't have to share one with anybody. Mm-hmm. From navigating friendships and healing to setting boundaries and prioritizing your mental health. These are real honest conversations.

We don't always get to have out loud. totally unreasonable with different parts of life, right? Like, oh, have all three meals and make sure you're mindful during all of them? Absolutely not. During one meal, I'm standing. I'm standing and handing my children food. Because healing, empowerment, and resilience aren't just ideas. Their practices.

And this Mental Health Awareness Month, there's no better time to pour back into yourself. Listen to cultivating her space on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. 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.com 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 Sondar 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 lowball them 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 fayed 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, Gohams had only been made head of search in the middle of 2018, after John Guenderea moved to Apple to work its machine learning and AI 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 Ragavan. Do you want to know what Probacar Ragavan's old job was? What Prabagar Ragavan, 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 Raghavan 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 price to VMware a few years later. That's not his fault. But nevertheless, Yahoo was a company without a mission, 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 ZD Nets Dan Farber from 2005, Ragavan spoke of his intent to align the commercial incentives 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. 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 Ragamann'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. Rackavan's 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, rubber card, 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 acapella band with their between songs banter. Who's the 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 Yardt. 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. You love 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, IHeart's 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. Agency, the ability to know that we're the experts in our own body. On the podcast, cultivating her space, Dr. Dom and Terry Lomax create a space where black women can show up fully and be heard. I wholeheartedly think, you know, you hit 30. You shouldn't have to share one with anybody. Mm-hmm. From navigating friendships and healing to setting boundaries and prioritizing your mental health. These are real honest conversations.

We don't always get to have out loud. Totally unreasonable with different parts of life, right? Like, oh, have all three meals and make sure you're mindful during all of them? Absolutely not. During one meal, I'm standing. I'm standing and handing my children food. Because healing, empowerment, and resilience aren't just ideas. They're practices.

And this Mental Health Awareness Month, there's no better time to pour back into yourself. Listen to cultivating her space on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Barts joined Yahoo in 2009, so about four years into Brohaka'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 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.

But 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 and 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 Raghavans' 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 Raghavan 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 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 that 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. Raghavann and his cronies worked to oust Ben Gohms, a man who dedicated the 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 Sundar Peshai could make more than $200 million a year. And Raghavan, a manager hired by Sondar Pishai, 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 Goames too. Every article about Ben Goams where they interviewed is this guy just having these dreamy thoughts about the future of information and the complexity 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 Kar Raghavan 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 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. Ragam'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 and I'll do work all of them. 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 workers who do the work are.

What happened to Ben Goams is one of the most disgusting, disgraceful things to happen in the tech industry. It's an absolute joke. Ben Goams 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 Goames 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, the 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, a 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. go. 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 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, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 helped make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and Head Rock

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. Your 20s can be so exciting, but they can also be really overwhelming, confusing, and honestly, just kind of lonely.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and the psychology of your 20s is breaking down the science behind the biggest roadblocks we face. I was six years into my career, the 80-hour weeks, and just the first one in, the last one out, and I ended up burning out. There was a large chunk of my 20s that I, like, was just so wanting to, like, be out of that phase out of my skin, and I just, like, really regret not living in the present more. You don't need to have everything figured out right now. You just need to understand yourself a little bit better.

Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The story I've told myself can then shape my behavior, and that can lead me to sabotage the possibility of connection. This Mental Health Awareness Month, tune into the podcast Deeply Well with Debbie Brown if you've been searching for a soft place to land while doing the work to become whole. This podcast is for you to hear more. Listen to Deeply Well with Debbie Brown from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get to. your podcast. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.