The day Google started to deteriorate: ‘We’re getting too close to the money’ | Technologies

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“I’m concerned because at Google we only think about growth,” Ben Gomez, then the company’s head of search, wrote in an internal email in 2019. It was part of an open debate when a group of senior officials who were very concerned about people doing fewer searches created a code…

This article is part of the weekly Technology newsletter, published every Friday. If you’d like to sign up to receive it in its entirety, with similar topics but more varied and concise, You can do this using this link.

“I’m concerned because at Google we only think about growth,” Ben Gomez, then the company’s head of search, wrote in an internal email in 2019. It was part of an open debate when a group of senior officials who were very concerned that people were searching less created Code Yellow, Google’s biggest internal alert: “This is sensitive, proprietary information, don’t share it.” ” they wrote.

One of the goals of Code Yellow was to increase the number of Google searches. The main problem they wanted to solve was for users to see more ads and earn more money from advertising. This email chain between Google executives came to light due to a monopoly lawsuit the company was involved in. Bloomberg

These emails were reported last fall, and a few days ago an article appeared in journalist Ed Zitron’s newsletter entitled The Man Who Killed the Google Search EngineAnd based on these emails and new details has sparked heated debate in Silicon Valley.

This story delves into the growing controversy over how Google search has gotten worse. According to this version, the culprit would be obvious: short-term money. The email chain clearly shows how the advertising department is putting pressure on the search department, which is trying not to harm the user experience.

Since 2014, Google has held over 90% of the search engine market. Now the advent of AI and its deteriorating responsiveness are calling that leadership into question. In March, at a meeting of all Google employees, Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan, who is now responsible for search and advertising, among other things, warned that the good times were over: “We can agree that it’s not 15 or 20 anymore.” years ago everything changed. Life won’t always be “cool,” Raghavan said.

Prabhakar Raghavan is precisely the figure whom Zitron accuses of “killing the Google search engine” for allegedly putting economic gain above good search results. The reason for such a complex process as sorting the web by billions of search queries is difficult to limit to one number. And given the buzz generated by the article about Raghavan’s role, the company responded bluntly: “As we have definitively stated: Our advertising systems do not influence the organic results you see in a search engine.” the company responded.

But debates in several emails, in which people in charge of the search engine tried to defend its integrity, suggest that the company may have prioritized growth over user experience at various times.

The whole discussion is fascinating, but there are a few quotes that stand out. Shashi Thakur, who was vice president of engineering, search and research in 2019, cautioned from the start that “our founders had a compelling reason to separate search from advertising.” Then, in a more limited message to his team, he wrote: “I think financiers are running around like headless chickens. I think the free ride is over and they are going to have to figure out for the first time how our business actually works.”

The most quoted phrases in these messages belong to Ben Gomez, the head of the search engine, who responded directly to Thakur: “I would keep a certain distance from all this. “We are getting too close to the money,” he wrote. He then admitted that there are two goals that make sense for his team, but there needs to be a red line that starts to be crossed: “I think it’s good that we’re looking to grow in search and have more users, but I think we We communicate too much with advertisers for the good of the product and the company.”

It’s easy to boil this debate down to one theme: more searches mean more advertising and therefore more profit. Of course, from a user’s perspective, it’s worse if it takes you three searches to find what was once enough. Google as a product will become worse; but the danger was not very great, considering the almost monopoly it enjoyed.

One search is better than three

In the email, which Gomez left in a draft (he only showed it to his team), he had already indicated what could happen: “We could quite easily, in the short term, increase search volume in ways that are not suitable for users: deactivate the check spell, deactivate improvements in the order, filling out the settings page. If we as a company want to go down this path, we need to talk about it. There may be trade-offs between different types of user problems caused by tricks to increase interaction. But I have to say that it makes me very uncomfortable.” Gomes felt so “uncomfortable” that he left his position a year later in favor of Raghavan, who continues his rise at Google to this day.

In the discussion of this article on the forum Hacker news, a sort of social network for Silicon Valley engineers, the most valuable answer comes from a former Google engineer who explains how complexity, not money, ate up search: “I know a lot of veteran engineers were upset when Ben Gomez was demoted. Probably the biggest change from what I’ve heard is the loss of Amit Singhal (who ran Google Search until 2016). Amit struggled with the increasing complexity. He wrote a semi-famous internal document in which he argued against other search leaders that Google should use less machine learning, or at least limit it as much as possible, to keep rankings debuggable and understandable to human engineers.

This engineer shares his view that since Singhal left, complexity has increased dramatically, with each team running as many deep learning projects as they can, like every other large company in the sector: “The old systems had obvious problems , and older systems have “hidden bugs and conceptual problems in newer versions that are often not reflected in metrics and that accumulate over time as complexity increases.” Finally, he explains that he found an old bug that was changing the order of the top results for 15% of queries since 2015. “I passed it on to someone else when I left, but I have no idea if anyone actually fixed it or not,” he says.

To all this complexity we must add the thousands and thousands of SEOs who try every day to trick or confuse the Google algorithm to show their results higher for the sole purpose of generating revenue from advertising or links to advertising platforms. e-commerce. These types of pages have gone from being reliable companies that were honestly trying to advise which coffee maker or tent to buy, to being pure spam. It’s all leading up to the perfect storm as one of the pillars of the 21st century, Google’s search engine, approaches the end of its days.

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