Google has found a new job for Prabhakar Raghavan, the executive largely responsible for running Google Search into the ground over the last four years — a period that’s seen Google’s search engine increasingly prioritize AI slop, shove more ads than ever at users, give Forbes and Reddit links priority placement, and basically make it harder than it’s ever been to find what you’re actually looking for.
Raghavan — who, before he came to Google, oversaw search at Yahoo during its decline from 2005 through 2012 — will now be Google’s chief technologist, working closely with CEO Sundar Pichai. “Prabhakar has decided it’s time to make a big leap in his own career,” Pichai wrote in a memo to Googlers. “After 12 years leading teams across Google, he’ll return to his computer science roots and take on the role of Chief Technologist, Google. In this role, he’ll partner closely with me and Google leads to provide technical direction and leadership and grow our culture of tech excellence.”
Ok, whatever.
I’ll admit it, I was over the moon about this news … at first. And then I noticed who Google is replacing Raghavan with: Nick Fox, a Googler who, before his stint at the company, worked as a consultant at McKinsey — aka, one of the most loathsome corporations in the history of mankind. Meaning, another bean counter is in charge of the biggest search engine on the planet and will, in all likelihood, continue Raghavan’s work of packing Google Search with ads, spam, SEO-optimized content, and AI that summarizes as much of all that as it can.
Meantime, giving you what you’re looking for remains the last thing Google Search actually cares about.
I can’t tell you how many times I have to shift over to an alternative search engine, like DuckDuckGo, to find something useful when I’m doing a search. Hell, the other day, I was trying to find a specific article I’d written in the past for a specific outlet, and even though I attached the outlet’s name to my search query, Google’s AI Overview still gave me what other outlets had written about the same thing (which matters, because some people are just going to stop there, with those AI Overviews that take over the top of the search results page).
Furthermore, few things signal the inexorable decline of Google Search as its desperate inclusion of crap like YouTube links and in-line YouTube videos, as well as Reddit and Quora threads plus garbage from Forbes, all of which seem to take up prime spots for the majority of searches these days. Never mind that if users like me wanted a damn YouTube video, we would … wait for it … just go to YouTube. It’s abundantly clear to people like me, whose livelihoods revolve around online publishing, that Raghavan’s tenure as the head of Google Search represents one of the most remarkable leadership failures at any tech company in years. And we’re all still paying for it.
