Last week, Prabhakar Raghavan was relieved of duty as Senior Vice President of Search, becoming Google's "Chief Technologist."  An important rule to follow with somebody's title in Silicon Valley is that if you can't tell what it means, it probably doesn't mean anything. The most notorious example of this is

2024 was a grim year for Google and a grimmer one for Raghavan, starting in February with its Gemini Large Language Model generating racially diverse nazis (among other things), a mess that Raghavan himself had to apologize for. A few months later, Google introduced AI-powered search summaries that told users to eat rocks and put glue on pizza, which only caused people to remember exactly how bad Google Search already was, and laugh at how the only way that Google seemed to be able to innovate was to make it worse.

Raghavan is being replaced by Nick Fox, a former McKinsey guy who, in the emails I called attention to in The Man Who Killed Google Search, told Ben Gomes that making Google Search more profitable was “the new reality of their jobs,” to which Ben Gomes responded by saying that he was “concerned that growth [was] all that [Google was] thinking about.”

  • Melody Fwygon@lemmy.oneEnglish
    6·
    28 days ago

    I am glad to see it when the selfish people at the top fall so far down the hill. They orchestrate their own falling typically, much like Ikarus in his waxen wings, falling when he flew too close to the sun in direct sunlight at the height of a hot summer’s day.

    As for Google; I hope the DoJ not only pulls up all of the resultant weeds in the garden, but also makes sure to till and salt the soil thoroughly, so that no part of Google can ever hope to rejoin it’s other pieces to form a monopoly or ‘anything like a monopoly’ on anything, ever, again.

    Google must rightfully suffer a most painful and enduring ‘Corporate Death Penalty’ so to speak; in order to ensure that no company ever gets so bold again. We must also repeat this with several other large companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Apple too; as well as a few other companies I’m unable to name because I’m unaware of how ridiculously massive and monopolistic they are.