How did Google go so wrong so quickly?

The Decline and Fall of the Google Empire?

I'd say Larry Page set the seeds for this when he was CEO for the second time and chose Sundar to be his successor while also forcing the company into a disastrous social platform when they should have focused on cloud while shutting down all the fantasy projects. Larry picked Sundar because he was a consolidator who got the other execs to stop fighting and was smart enough to know how to "grow" google's market share over the next decade (which he did). But that growth came at the expense of most of the things that made google great, and now that the profits aren't growing rapidly any more, all the stuff that was fun simply because there was a lot of money floating around are gone.

For me, it it began to end when a director stole my project from me and forced me out, then bad-talked me at perf calibration, and finally ended when I realized my new management was just "night school MBAs with a little bit of technical knowledge and no management skills other than ass kissing the VP".

When they stopped caring that the content they indexed was the same content users would view.

It's a slippery slope for both Google and the rest of the internet.

Google's downfall was set in motion long ago ... it's only the last two or three years some people found they were trying to use a search engine that was basically inoperative past a basic insert keywords and lets see what pops out. Maybe people like myself that started finding hard limits four years ago might have merely just been part of some A / B test or perhaps it's just I choose long ago not to share my private data since I've denied a number of API scrapers that had no permission or business poking the internals of my system.

But I don't level all the blame at google, I also place some blame the folks who create web sites and yes sure it's nice to see 100 to 500 words thrust up amongst images all pretty like, and fancy tables and interactive, but it's not so bright to not also include text output options for other search engines as well as those who still use simple text browsers or older OS systems.

I'll cheer the day a startup offers a search engine for the world wide web (ie not just for special browsers and geolocations) ... and simply ignores sites that are clever enough to print up your browser is out of date or location no good, instead of just offering a non javascript entry of however few words they have ... Of course some pages are interactive and probably not suited ... but then again, they usually don't contain much info or have chosen that format so as not to share that info without a good scrape of the user trying to access it.

From the outside I saw Google going downhill in the late 2000's when it started trying to push SEO-oriented publishers to becoming Adsense publishers. I have been reading this blog for a long time (my alter ego was a major commenter) and it tells the sordid tale in great detail if you dig deep into the history

http://www.seobook.com/blog

Oh it wasn't quick, this has been building for the better part of two decades.

In high school in the late 90s, I desperately wanted to be part of Google: they were the smartest people around, and seemed to be thinking 10 moves ahead of everybody else. They represented the digital utopian future our bearded elders had promised.

But by the time I got out of grad school in 2007, I was like "meh, it's mostly an ad platform, not so exciting; maybe someday". Now, there is almost nothing you do to get me to work at what I see as a company whose capacity for destruction is only limited by its manifest lack of any coherent vision. Fortunately, they seem to be tripping on their own feet recently, but if they ever get it together, it could be bad for everybody.

Some of that is probably down to my own changing priorities and increasing cynicism about our industry's effect on the world. But most of it is, I think, attributable to a change in Google. But what changed? Was there a specific moment when Google stopped being "cool", for lack of a better word? Or was it an accumulation of small problems? Were they never actually cool, and they just lucked into a couple neat products?

By showing the middle finger to the users and being a bit too arrogant in thinking they can't be replaced.

> ...so quickly?

Google being a very young company - it ain't like the Good Old Days(tm), when a big company used to have lots of people who'd been there for 25 to 40+ years, to say "WHOA!" if the company's culture started going sour. Plus the whole "everything is 10X faster in the internet age". And the Jack Welsh "screw honor and the common good, I'm gaming it for ME" ethos.

Also - Google's core business being pretty much a Monopoly Money Farm, there's little sense of "we gotta be careful and keep this a tightly-run and well-managed ship, or else our competition will watch us crash and burn".

I legitimately don't know what this is supposed to mean. I imagine there's an argument to be made about the fact that their search does kind of suck real bad, but it mostly doesn't matter because they do so many other things?

They fired Vic Gundotra

can you elaborate?

The most recent numbers indicate that they're still making a healthy profit. The usefulness of their search engine has been declining for years, to the point that I no longer bother using it, but I'm not sure the guys calling the shots care - their job is to make money.