Ed Zitron wrote a piece named The Man Who Killed Google Search. It goes through in detail how Prabhakar Raghavan, Google's former head of ads - led a coup so that he could run Google Search, and how an email chain from 2019 began a cascade of events that would lead to him running it into the ground, he said.
Everyone in the SEO/SEM space is talking about this article and I came back to the SEO on fire. If you have not read it yet, you should.
Update: I added Google's statements to this below:
I'll include some posts from Ed Zitron:
In February 2019, Google's ads and finance teams called a "code yellow" on search, because revenue was slow and - seriously - people were not asking Google enough questions. Ben Gomes, then head of search, refused to make Google Search worse for profit.https://t.co/ZpCanngMsO pic.twitter.com/KyoaKptQpN
— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) April 23, 2024
Gomes managed to help get Google through the code yellow - but Raghavan demanded more, saying Ben hadn't increased queries enough. Gomes sent a letter to stating he was "deeply, deeply uncomfortable" with the ways that Google wanted to grow search.https://t.co/ZpCanngMsO pic.twitter.com/VZbr79yyRx
— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) April 23, 2024
Prabhakar Raghavan may be a computer scientist, but he joined Google in 2012 as a manager, working directly under CEO Sundar Pichai, a former McKinsey man. Raghavan is a class traitor that deliberately ran out Ben Gomes, who worked on search for 19 years.https://t.co/ZpCanngMsO pic.twitter.com/2HAKZbBdOd
— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) April 23, 2024
Prabhakar Raghavan is a career failure, a man who has fallen upwards into the most important job in software, and since becoming head of search in 2020, Google has become an ultra-profitable and increasingly less-useful site. Raghavan is a villain.https://t.co/ZpCanngMsO pic.twitter.com/lGwWApvYhq
— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) April 23, 2024
Anyway, here's Raghavan from a few hours ago saying that the new operating reality of search is that they'll have less time to do things! https://t.co/YcUAgAvSdY pic.twitter.com/u6PRu2PTv0
— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) April 23, 2024
Further context from an ex search engineer that shares a little more context about how things got so much worse for search technologicallyhttps://t.co/r3oolCh7N2 pic.twitter.com/wknLjTRGik
— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) April 24, 2024
Here are some of the many posts from our industry on this:
Heroes, Villains, Code Yellows, and more -> Emails released as part of US v. Google show how Google's finance and ad teams led by Prabhakar Raghavan made Search worse to make the company more money
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) April 24, 2024
"The thread is a dark window into the world of growth-focused tech, where Thakur… pic.twitter.com/44q9d5tu7Y
To be fair, I've felt like we were in the Darkest Timeline for a long time now. pic.twitter.com/3E13xSi6as
— Keith Goode (@keithgoode) April 24, 2024
This article by @edzitron seems to have identified the dynamic behind Google's quality degradation.
— Chris Silver Smith (@si1very) April 24, 2024
He makes some leaps and assumptions in painting Prabhakar Raghavan as the villain in the story - I think it is likely there are multiple villains. But, I think he has correctly… https://t.co/1ljJ7WDr8u
Extremely biased, but still fascinating. Also fundamental truth that the Google Founders attempt to isolate organic search within a bubble of fake academia is failing. The managers, and the lawyers, who have all the real power, are far more interested in cold cash.
— Ammon Johns♞ (@Ammon_Johns) April 24, 2024
SEOs - read this article. It's got everything:
— Garrett Sussman ☕️🔎 (@garrettsussman) April 24, 2024
• Fantastic storytelling
• A savage take on a Google villain
• Validation for your most illicit SEO conspiracy theories (ads and search quality)
• Believable subtext for an ongoing Google narrative around the death of SEO https://t.co/Y7cUrVtEjX
And a lot more, see over here.
There is also a lot of good commentary, even from former Googlers, at HackerNews.
I am still digging out after two days, so I apologize not digging in more...
Forum discussion at X and HackerNews.
Update: 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. The March 2019 core update was designed to improve the quality of our search results, as all core updates are designed to do. It is incorrect to say it rolled back our quality or our anti-spam protections, which we've developed over many years and continue to improve upon.
(2) As we have stated definitively: the organic results you see in Search are not affected by our ads systems.
- 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, because there are changes you can make that actually reduce the number of queries but are good for users. So I never liked the notion of pure queries as a growth metric, but we also needed to agree on, like, what was the right growth metric. And so this was a discussion about exactly what could be a good metric."
- "I think this metric of using just queries is not one that optimizes appropriately... Ads also wants users for the long run, they also want long term business."
- "We were putting a significant effort into ideas that we thought would increase the amount -- satisfy more user needs and increase the amount of usage we had in search. Those two things are not necessarily at odds."
- "We have no way of growing queries directly unless we do a better job with search."
- "I was proposing things we would never do, like turning off spell correction. I could never imagine us doing that."
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.”
Q: …by "church and state separation," can you just further describe what that means? A: “What I mean is that the organic team does not take data from the ads team in order to affect its ranking and affect its result. The organic team operates independently.”
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, especially when these sites were suppressed in previous updates?
See the full response over here:
Here is my full statement on Google's response to this week's newsletter. They have failed to refute any statement that I made, and in doing so helped me find yet more emails from the DOJ that show Google's ads team made search worse to make money.https://t.co/iY7i6zKeMg https://t.co/O1RA8kNcB6 pic.twitter.com/UJEhC1zNa7
— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) April 25, 2024
