The man who killed Google Search?
HN readers react to a longform critique arguing that Google Search’s quality has collapsed under ad-driven leadership and “growth at all costs” incentives, with particular blame placed on current search chief Prabhakar Raghavan and post‑2010 cultural shifts inside the company. Commenters share anecdotes from ex‑Googlers, SEO practitioners and users about worsening results, spam, ML‑driven opacity and the promotion of Reddit/Quora, while debating whether this is the fault of one executive, broader corporate incentives, or the ad‑supported web itself. Many report migrating to alternatives such as Kagi, DuckDuckGo, Bing+LLMs, or even manual curation, and see AI both as a partial replacement for search and as a new source of low‑quality content.
Perceived Decline of Google Search
- Many commenters say Google web search quality has dropped sharply since ~2016–2019: more SEO spam, “parasite” sites, Reddit/Quora/LinkedIn clutter, and ads that blend with results.
- People report Google changing queries, prioritizing “popular” or commercial pages over exact matches, and burying small blogs and personal sites.
- Some note image search and maps still work reasonably well; web results, especially for technical or nuanced queries, are the main pain point.
Ads, Revenue, and SEO Spam
- Strong view that search has been optimized for ad revenue and shareholder growth, not user value.
- Several ex-employees describe an OKR/metrics culture where projects that juice ad metrics win, even when obviously bad for users.
- Others argue SEO spam and low‑quality content across the web are the root cause; critics respond that smaller engines (Kagi, Brave, etc.) manage spam better, implying Google is tolerating it because it’s profitable.
Management, Culture, and “Failing Up”
- Many see this as a classic “MBA/consultant takeover” story: internal power shifts from product/engineering leaders to growth‑driven managers.
- Multiple anecdotes from ex‑Googlers:
- Post‑2016 culture shift to “standard big‑corp” politics, cliques, perf‑driven development, and lack of product vision.
- Promotion systems that reward shipping anything that moves a metric, not building the right thing.
- Some push back that blaming one or two executives is scapegoating; structural incentives and the board’s growth demands matter more.
Impact on Creators and the Web
- Small site owners and SEOs report huge traffic collapses from recent “helpful content” and core updates, with no recourse or feedback.
- Debate over language like “robbed of livelihoods”: some say building on a single private platform is a gamble, others counter that a 90%‑share search engine is de facto infrastructure and its unilateral changes are socially dangerous.
- Several argue Google’s behavior has contributed to the “enshittification” of the web and reduced incentive to create open content.
Alternatives and New Paradigms
- Many have switched or experimented with DuckDuckGo, Brave, Bing, Kagi, or specialized tools. Kagi gets frequent praise, especially for user controls and lack of ads.
- A growing number now start with LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Bing+GPT) for many queries, using search only for validation or navigation.
- Some see this as the classic paradigm shift that eventually displaces dominant incumbents; others note Google’s revenues and stock price remain strong, so any “death spiral” will be slow.