Edward Zitron has been reading all of google’s internal emails that have been released as evidence in the DOJ’s antitrust case against google.
This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it.
The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. 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 due to, and I quote, “steady weakness in the daily numbers” and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind.
HackerNews thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
MetaFilter thread: https://www.metafilter.com/203456/The-core-query-softness-continues-without-mitigation
Wonder how this isn’t bigger news. The story is shocking, but absolutely confirms my gut feeling that google search has gone to shit in the last few years, and was fine before
Prabhakar Raghavan and the McKinsey-inspired management class forced the real tech people out and shit all over the search engine intentionally to squeeze out more short-term profits. Google: An Enshittification Tale