Hacker News Reader

Comment by wyck | Hacker News Reader

Google search is so sad these days, all results are media conglomerates, it's completely counter to the core reason why the internet existed. I really hope by catering to these mega corps that they are completely undermining their brand and someone else comes along and pulls the rug out from underneath them.

If anyone noticed during the first couple days of covid, google search was free from large media results, the algorithm reverted back to how it was years ago and it was such a breath of fresh air. Of course they fixed the algo immediately, it went back to only showing curated media results..there was an anon google employee who posted why this occurred.

View on HN

I think we are gonna see aversion from going public. Companies like Stripe and SpaceX are gonna stay private for a long time.

When SEC laws, shareholder interest, quarterly performance and stock volatility comes into play, corporations become this mindless soulless monster that will devour everything in its way and fuck consumers in every which way.

Democratization of funds from central authority to public creates disincentives and the shareholders don’t give a shit about many auxiliary things such as environmental concerns. Bottom line always matters.

It’s not just google but any public corporation. Can you imagine SpaceX being able to operate with the same passion with shareholder interests?

It's not, I would argue, those things.

It is, potentially, the compensation plans. If you go to the proxy document and look at how comp plans are set, they usually hire a consultant, and "best practices" drivers are cash + big bonus based on typically some TSR (total shareholder return metric).

So for google, "don't be evil" is what's written down, but for the top execs "sell ads" is what gets they paid out before they retire. And those senior level "lifers" are what 40 now?

Don't really have proof to support these claims though.

Not even sure "don't be evil" is still written down. [1]

[1] https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...

I find the only way to get useful results from google is to use the "site:xyz.com" or "related:" options.

Do you have a link to that thread where an anon google employee posted on why it occurred? Interested in what happened since I didn't realize it did.

The reason given: Legit covid information was not getting through during the fist few days of the crisis, basically made an emergency move to disable the whitelist/blacklist functionality of the algo which reverted to how it worked years ago.

It’s a hard problem because the lower down the pyramid you go the more content spam there is.

Do you have a source for the claim in the last paragraph? Would be very interested to read it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com