(2024-04-23) Zitron The Man Who Killed Google Search

Ed Zitron: The Man Who Killed Google Search. The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem.

The yellow, according to Steven Levy’s tell-all book about Google, refers to — and I promise that I’m not making this up — the color of a tank top that former VP of Engineering Wayne Rosing used to wear during his time at the company. It’s essentially the equivalent of DEFCON 1

Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google properties, had called a “code yellow” for search revenue

a few days beforehand on February 1 2019, Kristen Gil, then Google’s VP Business Finance Officer, had emailed Shashi Thakur, then Google’s VP of Engineering, Search and Discover, saying that the ads team had been considering a “code yellow” to “close the search gap [it was] seeing,”

Shashi forwarded the email to Gomes, asking if there was any way to discuss this with Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, and declaring that there was no way he’d sign up to a “high fidelity” business metric for daily active users on search.

Thakur listed the multiple points of disconnection between the ads and search teams, discussing how the search team wasn’t able to finely optimize engagement on Google without “hacking engagement,” a term that means effectively tricking users into spending more time on a site

When Gomes pushed back on the multiple requests for growth, Nick Fox added that all three of them were responsible for search, that search was “the revenue engine of the company,” and that bartering with the ads and finance teams was potentially “the new reality of their jobs.”

Prabhakar Raghavan, then Google’s Head of Ads and the true mastermind behind the code yellow, would respond curtly, saying that the current revenue targets were addressed “by heroic RPM engineering” and that “core query softness continued without mitigation” — a very clunky way of saying that despite these changes, query growth wasn’t happening.

In the March 2019 core update to search, which happened about a week before the end of the code yellow, was expected to be “one of the largest updates to search in a very long time. Yet when it launched, many found that the update mostly rolled back changes, and traffic was increasing to sites that had previously been suppressed by Google Search’s “Penguin” update from 2012 that specifically targeted spammy search results, as well as those hit by an update from an August 1, 2018, a few months after Gomes became Head of Search. (SEO)

A few months later in May 2019, Google would roll out a redesign of how ads are shown on the platform on Google’s mobile search, replacing the bright green “ad” label and URL color on ads with a tiny little bolded black note that said “ad,” with the link looking otherwise identical to a regular search link.

Five months later, a little over a year after the Code Yellow debacle, Google would make Prabhakar Raghavan the head of Google Search, with Jerry Dischler taking his place as head of ads. After nearly 20 years of building Google Search, Gomes would be relegated to SVP of Education at Google

Sundar Pichai, who previously worked at McKinsey — arguably the most morally abhorrent company that has ever existed, having played roles both in the 2008 financial crisis (where it encouraged banks to load up on debt and flawed mortgage-backed securities) and the ongoing opioid crisis.

These emails — which I encourage you to look up — tell a dramatic story about how Google’s finance and advertising teams, led by Raghavan with the blessing of CEO Sundar Pichai, actively worked to make Google worse to make the company more money. This is what I mean when I talk about the Rot Economy

Ben Gomes is a hero. He was instrumental in making search work, both as a product and a business, joining the company in 1999 — a time long before Google established dominance in the field

Do you want to know what Prabhakar Raghavan’s old job was?

He was the head of search for Yahoo from 2005 through 2012 — a tumultuous period that cemented its terminal decline, and effectively saw the company bow out of the search market altogether. His responsibilities? Research and development for Yahoo's search and ads products.

As I have previously stated, when Prabhakar Ragahavan, Yahoo’s secret weapon, was doing his work, Yahoo Search was so valuable it was replaced with Bing

Since Prabhakar took the reins in 2020, Google Search has dramatically declined

It’s because the people running the tech industry are no longer those that built it.

Now Raghavan has told those working on search that their "new operating reality" is one with less resources and less time to deliver things. Rot Master Raghavan is here to squeeze as much as he can from the corpse of a product he beat to death with his bare hands.

Barry Schwartz: How Prabhakar Raghavan Killed Google Search; Report.

Google sent me the following statements in response to this: (1) On the March 2019 core update claim in the piece: This is baseless speculation.

Relevant testimony from the DOJ trial that puts these misleading claims into context: From Ben Gomes’ testimony:
“From my perspective, queries had always been a tricky way to measure growth

From Jerry Dischler’s testimony:
Q: Do agree that the search team and the ads team are working together to accelerate monetization velocity, correct?
A: “The ads team would be accelerating monetization velocity. The search team is only accelerating monetization velocity to the extent that they tell the ads team about what new research they’re building.”

Update: Here is the response from Ed Zitron, he wrote in part: Google can play semantics all it wants, but if changes were made to an algorithm that increased traffic to previously-suppressed sites, how does one interpret these changes as anything other than a rollback

Zitron: In Response To Google

Calling this “baseless speculation” is equal parts unfair and ahistorical

Furthermore, I linked to several sources — including Roger Monti of Search Engine Journal — who on March 14 2019 referred to the March 2019 core update as “behaving like a rollback of previous updates.”

Google can play semantics all it wants, but if changes were made to an algorithm that increased traffic to previously-suppressed sites, how does one interpret these changes as anything other than a rollback, especially when these sites were suppressed in previous updates?

Nick Fox tells Gomes and Thakur that “[his] guess is that all these requests aren't going to subside. Given that (a) [they are] responsible for Search, (b) Search is the revenue engine of the company, and (c) revenue is weak, it seems like this is [their] new reality of [their] jobs.” The requests in question were referring to those made by Jerry Dischler

Dischler continues, asking the CC’d Googlers whether it’s “worth reconsidering a rollback” and requests “scrappy tactical tweaks” that they “know will increase queries,” before suggesting a change to search that “increases the vertical space between the search box, icons and feed on a new tab to make search more prominent.”