but yes, I agree the search results are not nearly as good as they once were. the search engineers who were keen on getting this running years ago have moved on to other things.
I think it's kind of insulting to say that. More realistically, maintaining things in the Google environment has a cost- the products are always changing, so just keeping an existing system running well takes a ton of time, and that time comes at the cost of launching new features. Realistically, usenet search results never represented a huge amount of traffic, and traffic is what gets attention at google.
That reeks of incompetence though. Systems shouldn’t be in so much flux that existing products keep breaking. Poor abstraction and tight coupling.
>and traffic is what gets attention at google.
This is likely what resulted in the huge collapse in engineering quality. People that spew out shit with flashy features for product managers get rewarded and move up while people who stabilize and maintain products are cast aside.
The size of the engineering group at google is more than 10x what it was back in the glory days of stuff like gmail, reader, maps, etc. Google now just makes incremental worse changes to existing products (look how slow maps and gmail are) and kills off things that the terrible engineering org can’t keep up with.
There are definitely great engineers at google, but the ratio of garbage to them has become untenable and Google is well on its path to mediocrity. A great example of this is that you have to do an interview again if you want to work on something actually innovative like self driving cars.
and other queries for my name return usenet posts in Google Groups: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.linux.development.ap...
but yes, I agree the search results are not nearly as good as they once were. the search engineers who were keen on getting this running years ago have moved on to other things.