Wanna listen to this story instead? Check out this week's Better Offline podcast, "The Man That Destroyed Google Search," available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.
This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it.
The story begins
Do you want to know what Prabhakar Raghavan’s old job was? What Prabhakar Raghavan, the new head of Google Search, the guy that has run Google Search into the ground, the guy who is currently destroying search, did before his job at Google?
He was the head of search for Yahoo from 2005 through 2012 […]
Christ on a stick, the fucking lore I’m learning today. I had never heard the name Prabhakar Raghavan before, but it seems like this dude has been the man behind the curtain in my life for a while. I used to use Yahoo before Google in the early 2000s before it became shit, and then I used Google until it became shit. I hope he doesn’t end up applying at DuckDuckGo next season.
It’s crazy, he co-authored the randomized algorithms textbook for a class I had in grad school. That and the information retrieval book he wrote are probably the two biggest components of his engineer cosplay, even to this day.
Christ on a stick, the fucking lore I’m learning today. I had never heard the name Prabhakar Raghavan before, but it seems like this dude has been the man behind the curtain in my life for a while. I used to use Yahoo before Google in the early 2000s before it became shit, and then I used Google until it became shit. I hope he doesn’t end up applying at DuckDuckGo next season.
Prabhakar’s mask falls off and it’s Vlad from Kagi
and then he trips and falls over and we find out Vlad’s just 3 small Peters Thiel in an overcoat
It’s crazy, he co-authored the randomized algorithms textbook for a class I had in grad school. That and the information retrieval book he wrote are probably the two biggest components of his engineer cosplay, even to this day.
I’ve been wondering whether “a functional web search” is something that will increasingly become impossible as the death of the web progresses.