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The Man Who Killed Google Search (www.wheresyoured.at)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 6 months ago (2 children)

As an programmer, I want to think out loud about possible technical solutions.

I would have kept the understandable / hand-made algorithm as the core of search results. If you want to do fancy machine learning, do it on the periphery and we can include the machine output in our algorithm and weight its importance by hand. This would allow us to back out of the decision, because we could lower the weight of the machine learning output as needed.

It sounds like Google jumped strait to including the machine learning in the core algorithm though, and now with a decade of complexity in the core algorithm they are no longer able to go back without huge effort.

In general, it's important to consider "is this a decision we can easily back out of?".

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago

Did you read the piece? This isn't a software issue, it got worse by design to push even more ads and stop suppressing the ad-ridden fake sites too.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Amazon (and I'm sure others) refers to this as a two way door. Good rollouts minimize impact and can be undone easily.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Exactly, and that's something my company is aggressively moving toward, even though our userbase is nothing like Google's. It's just good engineering to be able to rapidly undo an unfavorable rollout.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Google's operations are absolutely built around the idea of easy rollback. Their products, and the their entire product ecosystem, are not.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Yeah, they seem to do "easy roll-foward." Any service is subject to replacement, given a sufficiently motivated project manager. So if there's a problem in deployment, they just replace the whole thing.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

"emails"

It's like saying "trafficks" or "firmwares".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

It still is.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (6 children)

It overall seems like a good article but this is why I kind of hate Ed Zirtron's reporting:

For those unfamiliar with Google’s internal scientology-esque jargon, let me explain. A “code yellow” isn’t, as you might think, a crisis of moderate severity. The yellow, according to Steven Levy’s tell-all book about Google, refers to — and I promise that I’m not making this up — the color of a tank top that former VP of Engineering Wayne Rosing used to wear during his time at the company. It’s essentially the equivalent of DEFCON 1 and activates, as Levy explained, a war room-like situation

Overall the reporting is interesting, but weird comments like this show his naked disdain for everyone and everything in the tech industry which does not make him a particularly trustworthy source.

Like "oh my god, how dare a company choose an arbitrary alert system based on a quirky influential engineer's practices, what crazy psychos!"

If he sees the code yellow tank top thing as some crazy ridiculous thing that no company should do, then I can't really trust his interpretation of the rest of the emails and documents etc.

Later in the article, he boils everything down to literally "Heroes vs Villains", and maybe in this case both of them are archetypal representations of those roles, but based on his appearances on behind the bastards it feels more like he always needs to boil everything down to black and white, good vs evil, bastard vs non bastard, with nothing in between, which again, makes it hard to trust his overall interpretations of what he's read.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Overall the reporting is interesting, but weird comments like this show his naked disdain for everyone and everything in the tech industry which does not make him a particularly trustworthy source.

I'd disagree - what this shows is only disdain for everyone who's fucking up technologies for the sake of profit. And I'm with him there, I found it refreshing to read an accurate account of what pieces of shit work behind the scenes in the industry. Not that I am surprised, but the account of what seems to have happened in detail and in that sequence was new to me.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I'd disagree - what this shows is only disdain for everyone who's fucking up technologies for the sake of profit.

Well you can disagree all you want but I don't see how you can read his snarky comments and think that.

His criticism of the code yellow is not because anyone involved in the code yellow procedure, invention, or naming deserves anything. He just hates everyone in tech so much that a whimsical name must be a bastard move, and not just people at their job trying to make the most of it.

I found it refreshing to read an accurate account of what pieces of shit work behind the scenes in the industry

Yeah, cause you're accepting his characterizations of everyone as bastards at face value despite not knowing them and despite knowing that Ed Zirtron thinks everyone is a bastard because it makes his world simpler. Yes it is "refreshing" to stop thinking about complex chains of actions and consequences and just think "he's an evil bastard man and it's all his fault".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

"[considering] everyone as bastards" is a strawman argument. Furthermore, the people described are assholes by the evidence provided, assuming the evidence is noy falsified.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 months ago

Furthermore, the people described are assholes by the evidence provided

No, far from it. Noone involved with the naming of the code yellow name has any evidence of bastardry presented at all.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Hunter S Thompson wrote a scathing eulogy for Richard Nixon, which I think is relevant here:

"Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism -- which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful."

(Non paywalled link: https://web.archive.org/web/20150213034115/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a-crook/308699/)

Sometimes, you need one or two journalists who are in a position to say "you know what? These people suck, and I'm sick of pretending they don't". It doesn't need to be every journalist, and it probably shouldn't be, but someone needs to say it.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

Yeah, I mean that's kinda of the whole conceit of Behind the Bastards, the host is explicitly and inherently calling everyone they cover a bastard by default, but if you listen to Ed Zirtron's appearances, he always just immediately wants to boil them down to a bastard as the root cause of their actions, when the literal entire point of that show is to examine what factors and backgrounds turn someone into a bastard.

Or again, I just can't understand why he would be flabbergasted by a company naming their alert system after an early engineers' tank top colour. Does he think all quirkiness and whisky should be outlawed from the workplace?

Yes, there's value in calling people bastards and scum and villains, but Ed Zirtron does it immediately, every time, which makes his judgement of them untrustworthy. There's the old adage that "if everything hurts when you poke it your finger is broken", in Ed's case given that everyone is always a bastard or a hero, it seems more plausible to me that he has some pathological need to boil everything down to simple binary systems.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

There's the old adage that "if everything hurts when you poke it your finger is broken"

I feel Iike the correct application of this analogy here is "if everyone you examine is a bastard, you're the bastard."

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

There's quirkiness and [whimsy?], and there's needless obfuscation. 'Code Yellow' meaning 'Code Red' is dumb. Like I get it, it probably started as an equivalent to 'Code Wayne' and subverting expectations is funny, but it's a punchline from an old adult swim show more than anything. I get that Google HQ isn't a Hospital or the military, but sometimes clarity is important. More now because they're actively doing contracts for governments and militaries, not a scrappy startup. They became a trusted resource and are now cannibalizing themselves for short term gains.

Whimsy at the top of a company while their workers are protesting their actions isn't great.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

There's quirkiness and [whimsy?], and there's needless obfuscation. 'Code Yellow' meaning 'Code Red' is dumb. Like I get it, it probably started as an equivalent to 'Code Wayne' and subverting expectations is funny, but it's a punchline from an old adult swim show more than anything. I get that Google HQ isn't a Hospital or the military, but sometimes clarity is important. More now because they're actively doing contracts for governments and militaries, not a scrappy startup. They became a trusted resource and are now cannibalizing themselves for short term gains.

If someone at a company tells you "code yellow" do you stop what you're doing and follow your drilled into memory code yellow training from school, or do you say "hey, what does code yellow mean?". They're not obfuscating anything, they've just got a company procedure with a quirky name.

Shitting on that just shows that you are looking for things to shit on them for, rather than being a thoughtful critic pointing out valid flaws.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 6 months ago

It seems clear to me that he hates the people that are ruining the tech industry, ripping off customers, and pumping out shitty projects for short term stuck pumps, and he takes every opportunity to shit on those people and point out their idiosyncrasies. That's pretty much every tech CEO these days.

It's also pretty clear to me that he believes in the promise of the industry, and thinks that workers deserve better than the people that they work for.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago (1 children)

If I hear code yellow, I assume I need to grab a mop and bucket.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

And an illustrated book about birds.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It’s an interesting piece and starts in the traditional journalism mold, but moves much more into opinion and blog. Like going from NewsHour to Last Week Tonight. That’s not to say it’s not an interesting read or he’s not supporting his argument, but it is about persuading, not just reporting. Of course, I haven’t actually gone through all his references to see if they’re mischaracterized or taken out of context.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago

I agree with both your comments, but there's something so satisfying about reading vitriol about a type of person you fucking hate. I kinda liked that he doesn't hide his bias or disdain for these people.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

It’s like a reverse Kara Swisher. Which, though I hate her work and her complete lack of integrity, I don’t want. I totally get and agree with your take.

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