How Google Changed Its Search for the Worst
Originally published April 24, 2024
All digital businesses have the technological capabilities to shitification [enshittification]: the ability to adapt and modify key functions of their business in real time and for different users, allowing them to quickly redistribute value among customers, end users and shareholders.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/
If you would like to read or share this topic in essay format, here is a link to it at pluralistic.netmy blog, free from surveillance, advertising and trackers:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan
In this regard, an important question arises: why do companies decide to worsen conditions at a certain moment, postponing this step until later? After all, it would seem that one can always benefit by worsening the attitude towards clients and reducing the quality of service. By earning more per product and reducing supply costs, companies increase profits for their investors.
But it's not that simple. It is true that manipulating prices and quality can increase profits in the short term, but these tactics can lead to serious losses. The company risks losing customers to competitors, facing sanctions from regulators, or a mass departure of employees who value the product's reputation.
Companies may not resort to worsening conditions for a long time… until a certain point. According to one theory, aboutnor constantly analyze the competitive environment, the actions of regulators and the morale of their employees. When analysis shows that conditions are favorable, managers may decide to take a risky step.
Examples of such poor decisions are Myspace and Yahoo. These companies degraded the quality of their services and increased their costs (measured in both dollars and advertising), which ultimately led to their demise. Taking the path of worsening conditions in the hope of increasing profits, they lost, losing user trust and market position.
This model does not explain the phenomenon of the “Great Sold Out,” when many technology companies simultaneously begin to reduce the quality of their services. Perhaps this is because they all use the same consulting firm (cough, McKinsey, cough), which essentially acts as a kind of starter pack for the massive shitification of the industry.
However, I believe the reason is deeper. The main task of any CEO is showing up to work every morning and trying your best to pull the “crap” lever, hoping to increase profits by redistributing value from suppliers and customers to your company.
We get good digital services when this leverage remains in place, blocked by competition, regulations, alternative clients and ad blockers, and the strong position of employees reinforced by a tight labor market or powerful unions.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain
When Google ordered its employees to create a secret Chinese search engine that would censor search results and expose dissidents to the Chinese secret police, Googlers rebelled and refused, and the project died:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)
When Google tried to win a US government contract to create artificial intelligence for drones used to target and kill civilians far from the battlefield, Googlers rebelled and refused, and the project died:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/technology/google-pentagon-project-maven.html
There have been significant changes recently that explain the simultaneous decline in service quality at many technology companies. This was especially noticeable at Google, where shortly after an $80 billion stock buyback that could theoretically pay employees for the next 27 years, there was a mass layoff of 12,000 workers. The move symbolized the erosion of the power of tech workers who had previously been able to influence corporate policy.
Competition, which has traditionally restrained corporations from overusing their power, has also been sidelined by lax antitrust policies. This led to the merger of many of the major players in the industry, creating giants and limiting competition through predatory pricing.
Additionally, lax enforcement of privacy, labor rights, and consumer protection policies has further strengthened the tech giants' hand. The introduction of strict intellectual property rules, criminalizing most forms of reverse engineering and aftermarket modifications, has removed obstacles to the free movement of the “refinement” lever.
Now that every technology leader has almost unlimited freedom of maneuver, he can come to work every morning and, without obstacles, pull the “gentrification” lever to the maximum. This was clearly demonstrated, for example, when Google workers protested against the company's involvement in military projects in Gaza. Instead of shutting down the project or revising its policies, Google chose to fire en masse employees who expressed disagreement:
Shitfication is a macroeconomic phenomenon determined by the regulatory environment in the areas of competition, privacy, labor, consumer protection and IP. But shitification is also a microeconomic phenomenon, the result of countless fights in boardrooms and product planning within companies, in which everyone is trying to make the company's products and services worse, and fighting against competitors who want to leave everything as is or to make them better, whether out of principle or fear of consequences.
In these microeconomic duels we find heroes and villains – those who fight for the user or defend fair conditions, against those who want to cheat and deceive in order to do better for the company and get bonuses and raises for themselves:
https://locusmag.com/2023/11/commentary-by-cory-doctor-dont-be-evil/
These microeconomic struggles are usually hidden from the public eye because companies operate in secret, and our understanding of their activities is often shaped only by the occasional leak, whistleblower account, or visible labor protest. However, when a company becomes a party to a lawsuit, a unique “window” into its inner world opens before us. This is especially true when the plaintiff is such a powerful body as the US government.
Returning to Google, the company that revolutionized the Internet a quarter century ago by creating a search engine that seemed almost magical. But now the company has fallen so far into decline that large swaths of the Internet have become invisible to the 90% of users who rely on Google as their main portal to the Internet.
With the DOJ Antitrust Division filing a lawsuit against Google, we expect a deep and comprehensive examination of the company, including the release of internal emails and documents, that will give us a clearer picture of its current status and practices:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics
Google is a technology company, and technology companies have a literary culture – they operate on email and other forms of written communication, even when it comes to random things that most often happen in a chat room rather than at the water cooler. This means that technology companies companies have gigantic databases full of confessions to every crime they've ever committed:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/
There are currently large chunks of Google's crime database on public display – so many of them that making sense of it all and understanding what it means is no easy feat. But some people try and find gold. One such successful prospector is Ed Citron, who has compiled a stunning report on exactly how Google search turned into crap, and named the names of the executives at the origins of the rot:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Citron's book describes the battle over search quality that unfolded at a Google board meeting, where Ben Gomeza key employee who shaped the company's best years, lost the battle Prabhakar Raghavan. Raghavan, a computer scientist who switched to management, proposed a strategy aimed at increasing the number of search queries and, consequently, the volume of advertising. His approach meant reducing the quality of searches, forcing users to spend more time on Google searching for the information they needed.
Citron contrasts the biographies of these two figures. Gomez, the real hero of the story, worked at Google for 19 years, solving complex technical problems and eventually becoming the company's “search czar.” Raghavan, as an antagonist, has been “forging an upward path” in his career, including a stint as Yahoo's head of search from 2005 to 2012, during which Yahoo's search business declined and the company's market share fell from 30.4 % to 14%, and eventually Yahoo switched to Bing.
According to Citron, it was Raghavan, with the support of former McKinsey Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who orchestrated Gomez's ouster. It was a triumph for the company's strategy of undermining product quality to boost profitability, bolstered by the belief that with exclusive deals to provide search on devices from the iPhone to Samsung and web browsers like Mozilla, the company would not face serious consequences for its behavior.
This paints a picture of a company that is not only too big to fail, as FTC Chairman Lina Khan put it on “The Daily Show,” but also too big to care about the consequences of her actions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaDTiWaYfcM
Citron has done an excellent job of finding forensic evidence and his article is excellent. But there is one point on which I disagree with him. Citron writes: “That's because the people who run the tech industry are no longer the same ones who built it.”
I think he gets it wrong. I think there have always been shit-fixers in the directors' offices of these companies. When Page and Brin brought war criminal Eric Schmidt to run the company, he undoubtedly began each day with a ritualistic, violent jerking the lever of shit. The difference was not who sat in the cabinet, but how freely the lever moved.
On Saturday I wrote:
Platforms used to treat us well, but now they treat us poorly. It's not because they were setting a trap for patients, luring us in with a good attitude in the hope that we would shut ourselves in and turn our backs on them. Tech bosses don't have the executive function to wait years.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/22/kargo-kult-kaptialism/#dont-buy-it
Someone on Hacker News called it “stupid,” adding that “tech bosses actually have the executive function to sit on hold for years and years. That's literally the business model of most startups”:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40114339
However, this picture is incomplete. A startup's business model is often based on constantly pulling the lever of shitification. Technology leaders don't wait for the perfect moment to exploit their employees, users, business customers and suppliers – they continuously strive to extract maximum value from them. It is only after reaching a certain size, when they become “too big to care,” that their efforts begin to bear fruit. This is what is meant by “too big to care.”
In antitrust circles they say that “the process itself is a punishment.” Regardless of the outcome of the US Department of Justice's case against Google, the company's internal materials have become public. The secrecy that previously surrounded this process meant that many aspects went unnoticed when they were initially revealed. However, as Citron's research shows, this treasure trove of documents, now available to everyone, contains a lot of valuable information.
When future researchers analyze the Enshittocene Epoch, they will draw on work like Citron's to highlight key moments in the transition from the “good old Internet” to the “Enshitternet.” We can only hope that these future scientists will have access to a new, better internet that will allow them to freely publish their scientific work.
Since you have read to the end, I will be glad to see you in my tg channel. I am writing excerpts from essay by Paul Graham, about updates in my two current projects, as well as various technical materials that I find in the process of work. I don't force anyone 🙂
