The Former Head of Ads Intentionally Ruined Google Search: Report
According to Edward Zitron's newsletter, where's your edit?, internal emails obtained during the current Google vs. US case have provided insight into "the man who killed Google Search."
In addition to discussing the person who brought Google Search to its demise, Zitron's research explains the slow decline of the widely used search engine. It all began in 2019 when Google Search entered "code yellow" mode as a result of falling user engagement and income. Then-search director Ben Gomes refused to make Search worse for profit, despite demands from Jerry Dischler (VP/GM of adverts) and Prabhakar Raghavan (director of Ads) for a rise in users and more adverts. Gomes spent twenty years working on Search.
Gomes often voiced his displeasure with code yellow, stating that he felt
"deeply, deeply uncomfortable" with how Google intended to expand
Search and was concerned that it was becoming "too close to the
money."
In 2020, after five
months, Prabhakar Raghavan assumed leadership of the Search after implementing
the majority of these modifications under code yellow. Zitron labels Raghavan a
"class traitor" and accuses him of purposefully running out of Ben
Gomes. He also brings up Raghavan's past employment with Yahoo for its search
and advertising divisions, highlighting how, under his leadership, Yahoo's
market share dropped from thirty-four percent to almost nonexistent. Zitron
even goes so far as to label Raghavan as a "failed career."
Despite having successfully gotten Search to work with code yellow on an individual basis, Raghavan insisted on more, saying that Search was still not receiving enough user requests. Zitron claims that code yellow purposefully made advertisements more difficult to discern from standard results and compelled a reversal of Search's anti-spam safeguards between 2012 and 2018.
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