The rapid decline in the quality of Google search has been both frustrating and sad. They did a rather good job for about 25 years, and now the quality has fallen off a cliff. What happened? AI is certainly part of the blame, but a bigger reason for the decline is quite a bit more sinister.
Last year, Ed Zitron wrote a fantastic article titled “The Man Who Killed Google Search“, where he places the blame squarely on one person: Prabhakar Raghavan.
The article unpacks the full story, but Raghavan pushed to make ads feel more like organic results, and removed helpful features from Google such as “turning off spell correction, turning off ranking improvements, or placing refinements — effectively labels — all over the page“.
In order to give Raghavan the power to do these things, Google had to force out Ben Gomes, who by all accounts was a fantastic and honorable man. Among other things in the article, they shared:
- “Ben Gomes is a hero. He was instrumental in making search work, both as a product and a business, joining the company in 1999 — a time long before Google established dominance in the field.”
- “Every single article I’ve read about Gomes’ tenure at Google spoke of a man deeply ingrained in the foundation of one of the most important technologies ever made, who had dedicated decades to maintaining a product with a — to quote Gomes himself — ‘guiding light of serving the user and using technology to do that.'”
Ultimately, it’s sent Google in a horrible direction. Perhaps they’ll recover, perhaps not, but much damage has been done. To close, and bring the title of this post back in, I’ll share one last quote from the article (which you really should go read):
“Raghavan and his cronies worked to oust Ben Gomes, 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 ground so that Sundar Pichai could make more than 200 million dollars a year.”
