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Requiem for Raghavan

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

Although ostensibly less ridiculous, Raghavan has likely been given a ceremonial title and a job that involves "partnering closely with Sundar Pichai and providing technical direction," as opposed to actually leading it. Though it's not clear what was done to resolve the "query softness" that Raghavan demanded was reversed, I hypothesize one of the moves involved rolling back changes to search that had suppressed spammy content. There is a compelling case to be made that we are watching the slow, painful collapse of Google — a company best known for a transformational and beloved product it chose to ruin, helmed by a management consultant that has, for the most part, overseen the decay of its brand.

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