Guess I'm on an enchittificaiton bender today or something.
This piece is a long read. It's worth it if you like "inside baseball" stuff from. We all know that Google search sucks, and I don't think we're surprised that ads and seo BS are major factors. But the amount of damage caused by one man who seems to have failed his way up through the industry is still impressive:
When Raghavan joined the company, Yahoo held a 30.4 percent market share — not far from Google’s 36.9%, and miles ahead of the 15.7% of MSN Search. By May 2012, Yahoo was down to just 13.4 percent and had shrunk for the previous nine consecutive months, and was being beaten even by the newly-released Bing. That same year, Yahoo had the largest layoffs in its corporate history, shedding nearly 2,000 employees — or 14% of its overall workforce.The man who deposed Ben Gomes — someone who worked on Google Search from the very beginning — was so shit at his job that in 2009 Yahoo effectively threw in the towel on its own search technology, instead choosing to license Bing’s engine in a ten-year deal. If we take a long view of things, this likely precipitated the overall decline of the company, which went from being worth $125bn at the peak of the Dot Com bubble to being sold to Verizon for $4.8bn in 2017.