Ed links Google's search decline to pressure for more queries

Transcript

From the transcript The Diary Of A CEO publishes with the episode.

1. 52:49

   So we know that some of the biggest companies in the world are using AI, generative AI, to write a lot of their code. That is a great productivity gain for those companies, right? I mean, have you used Google or Facebook or Instagram or GitHub recently? Because they are... catastrophically worse. Amazon Web Services went down multiple times because of their AI coding tool. How is Google worse? Well, I'll tell the story of a real arsehole, a guy called Prabhagar Raghavan.

2. 53:02

   Previously, one of the heads of ads at Google. In 2019, Google called something called a code yellow, which is when they said, we've got a problem. And it was material weakness in query numbers, which means the amount of times that people were searching on Google search. Guy called Ben Gomes, internal at Google, then the head of Google search, says, okay, wait a minute, to increase this number of using Google more, we're going to have to, I mean, what you're suggesting would mean we give worse answers, because if someone got the answer quickly, that would reduce the amount of queries, right?

3. 53:32

   And people at Google, Shashi Thakur was another engineer who was saying, yeah, can we please tell Sundar this? Because this doesn't seem good. We can't just increase the amount of queries. That would just mean that people would have to search more, which would make the product worse. But it would make them more money, are you saying? Yes. Because you'd show them more ads. So if you were spending more time on Google because Google's work...

4. 53:51

   But is this linked to AI doing code? Oh, I'll get there. So this is... The problem is that this guy called Prabhupar Raghavan, who was the head of ads at the time, was pushing, pushing and saying, no, we need to make more queries happen. Got to make it happen. Nick Fox, who was there as well, I believe he's actually taking over Google search, said, got to make them go up. This is our new reality. Yeah.

5. 54:11

   Sometime in early 2020, Prabhagar Raghavan takes over Google search. From then, and this is what I believe, can't prove it, if you go and look around the various SEO sites such as a journal and the various forums, Google stripped back a lot of the suppression of spammy sites so that people would be on Google more. And then over the course of time, Google wanted to create more queries, and Google search became much worse.

6. 54:35

   It's why people always do, like, plus Reddit, or from Reddit, or what have you. It's because the actual underlying search results of Google had got worse. And then generative AI came along. And Prabhbagar, wouldn't you know, it gets... put to run part of Gemini. And Google also was having trouble getting people back on Google. And what did they think they'd do? Well, shit, everyone's talking about this AI thing.

7. 54:55

   We'll just put it right at the top. So people have to stay at Google. And actually they'll use it more because instead of searching websites and doing that annoying thing where they click away from Google, they'll just only use Google instead of generating answers, by which I mean, giving you search results you click through. Now Google is the answer. Is it right? God, no. It might tell you to eat rocks.

8. 55:14

   might eat poisonous mushrooms maybe i'll give you a little few links you could click through but the ideal situation was that ai was the ultimate form of google's evil which was but i'm saying here i'm saying here but that's not the fact that coders could code on google that's made google worse that's human decisions have made it worse yes and then there's the instability of google's platform which is actually i should have probably led with that a problem across the whole tech industry Okay, so you're saying Google is going down more.

9. 55:41

   Yes, Google is less stable. Google Docs is a bug fest right now and has been for a while. Google Sheets, same deal. And the thing is, you're right. I'm being a little unfair. This is everyone. It's the same with Microsoft. It's the same with Amazon. It's the same across the world. How do we quantify that outside of anecdotes? Like, is there a way to... You're right. I mean, GitHub downtime is the best example.

10. 56:01

    Amazon Web Services went down, I think, two or three times this year because of AI tools. Wow. And honestly, you're right. It's kind of hard to quantify outside of anecdotes. But I challenge anyone listening to this, go and use the website these days and tell me how well it works. Tell me how buggy it is. Tell me how many problems, even with my iPhone, the supposed best UX in town, even the iPhone is a flipping mess these days.

11. 56:24

    Okay, so the research says... The short answer is yes. Tech downtime and software outages have demonstrably increased over the last few years, and industry data points directly to the explosion of AI-assisted coding as a primary culprit. The problem is hitting the tech industry from two entirely different directions. The code itself is getting buggier, and the sheer volume of AI activity is literally crashing the underlying infrastructure.

12. 56:49

    Interesting. Yeah, that's because GitHub, people are just writing a bunch of code, pushing it, That's interesting. Yeah, it's a real mess as well because open sources have this problem as well because it's well-meaning people. They're like, oh, I learned a bit of code with an LLM. I'm going to go out and do some stuff. I'm going to make this project better. And these people barely understand what they're shipping.

13. 57:11

    Or maybe they understand a bit of code and they say, oh, Dunning-Kruger, this motherfucker. I'm just like, I can understand some of this. And now the code's all written and just push it right now. So GitHub is flooded with AI code. This sounds like it's making humans complacent. It is. Because we're going, okay, look, I'll let it write the code for the last 100 lines. And it was broadly right. So the next 100 lines, I won't check them as much.

14. 57:34

    Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's human nature, is to get sort of to take shortcuts, to spend less energy on an activity if you can. Right, but the AI's still making the mistake and we're still making all the promises of AI. That's the thing. This thing is meant to be this autonomous... You say it can't be perfect. I don't know. Based on what Sam Altman has been saying for the last few years, Clammy Sammy's been promising the world, saying this will replace software engineers.

15. 57:59

    Dario Amodei, Wario himself, has been saying, oh yeah, 50% of white-collar labor is going to go away in the next few years. These people are promising the world. Again, if they were... saying it would be smaller and they were like yeah it does have issues and we must be none of this oh what if it wakes up and it's super powerful just like yeah it's probabilistic it's going to make mistakes and if you don't know what you're doing you don't really know what you're looking at you're going to miss those mistakes and it's going to get multiplicatively worse as you go when you don't know what you're doing so yeah human nature is part of it but so is the marketing so are the promises