This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it. The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then

Edward Zitron has been reading all of google’s internal emails that have been released as evidence in the DOJ’s antitrust case against google.

This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it.

The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google properties, had called a “code yellow” for search revenue due to, and I quote, “steady weakness in the daily numbers” and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind.

HackerNews thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976

MetaFilter thread: https://www.metafilter.com/203456/The-core-query-softness-continues-without-mitigation

  • This is fine🔥🐶☕🔥English
    0•6 months ago

    That was an ad guy doing ad guy things. Why the fuck the product guy do what he did? Cause he didn’t give a shit about his domain.

    Edit: lmao reading it again looks like the ad guy cared more about the search than the actual search guy. Makes you look like a right dingus.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•6 months ago

      Have you spent any amount of time around software engineers who aren’t from India? You may be idealizing us - a lot.

      I’ve worked extensively with devs from NY, SF and Toronto (where I’m located). The ideal “innovative” “passionate” devs are maybe 2 to a company. The rest just want to put food on the table, buy a house, buy a car, go on vacation and fuck off at the end of the day. How do you think fb and Google built their privacy nightmares? By exclusively hiring Indians? Or by dangling enough money at devs of all races who don’t give a shit?

      Pretty much every single one of my colleagues will gladly write code to turn the product into complete dog shit if the “ad guy” shows up with a million dollar paycheck. What do I care? It’s not my baby. My actual real life baby’s future matters more to me than the future of whatever product my current company is working on.

      Being an Indian yourself does not absolve you of your racist tirades against other Indians. Learn to be empathetic towards others. If I, a privileged dude-bro, can understand why people who grow up with extreme resource contention and competition behave the way they do, then you should get it too.