Sundar Pichai is like (the Hamilton version of) Aaron Burr. He rose to the top by not making noise and survived to be last man standing as the most inoffensive nonthreatening choice.

> nothing much has changed, only the perception of the public.

I would say things have changed: directly in google services, they are worse everyday (ads in youtube, useless search engine etc.) and also indirect: they forced their black box in all sites' SEO and also adsales on so many sites that they are slowly ruining the internet for everyone else too.

At this point I feel like it's that Search has gotten significantly worse. I've had pages of results that are completely AI-generated text, with my search query just rephrased as a sentence. As an employee, it's disappointing.

What's worse is that it actively tries to rewrite your query by dropping keywords (esp. ironic when it does it to the single most important thing in said query) and substituting "synonyms" which aren't, presumably so that the output would have more results.

I find having to quote things more and more, to the point where all or almost all keywords are quoted. Lately, somehow, even that produces results that don't actually include everything that was quoted.

When you put every keyword in quotes it still incorrectly stems them, and it still ignores some keywords completely.

I also wonder why almost no web forums I use are coming up in results at all, despite their robots.txt allowing indexing. Feels like Google is becoming a bit like East Germany...

As a loyal Google user from 1999-2021 that has now fully decoupled from all of it's services, it's a deeply tragic loss.

If Google is so large and so arrogant that they can't even take feedback from internal employees then it's probably game over for them. They certainly aren't listening to developers and power users on forums.

The search engine is significantly worse than it was even a few years ago.

You'll find plenty of people who support every side of every issue here. You'll also find plenty of people who call out the people who support $BAD_SIDE of an issue as "classic HN" and "Silicon Valley folly". In this case, as in others, it's all in your head.

> The same goal as most other Fortune 500 companies CEO, to earn as much money as possible for themselves while they are at it.

Sure, but you don't get a company working in concert or particularly well if all you have is "go make money"

The person you're responding to doesn't mean "the company making as much money as possible". They mean "Sundar is earning as much money for himself (into his own bank account) as possible". And for that, it doesn't matter if the company is working in concert etc. when Google can coast on ad revenue for many years.

1. Get stock grants 2. Sell it as soon as it vests 3. Apres moi le deluge.