Internal emails revealed through the recent Google vs US lawsuit have shed light on “the man who killed Google Search”, according to Edward Zitron’s newsletter, where’syouredat? Zitron’s report not only talks about the man responsible for ruining Google Search but also how the gradual downfall of the popular search engine took place.
It all started when Google Search went into “code yellow” in 2019 due to declining revenue and user engagement. Jerry Dischler (VP/GM of Ads) and Prabhakar Raghavan (Head of Ads), demanded an uptick in user count and an influx of ads to boost revenue, but Ben Gomes, who was the head of Search back then, refused to make Search worse for profit. Gomes worked on Search for 20 years.
Gomes expressed his frustration with code yellow time and time again, saying that he was “deeply, deeply uncomfortable” by the ways Google wanted to grow Search and was worried that it was getting “too close to the money.”
Although he managed to get Search through code yellow, individually, Raghavan demanded more, claiming that Search was still not getting enough user queries. According to Zitron, code yellow forced a rollback on Search’s anti-spam protections from 2012 and 2018, and deliberately made ads harder to distinguish from regular results.
Five months later in 2020, Prabhakar Raghavan, who had enforced most of these changes under code yellow became the head of the Search. Zitron blames Raghavan for deliberately running out Ben Gomes and calls him a “class traitor.” He also brings up Raghavan’s history of working with Yahoo for its search and ad business and how Yahoo’s market share went from 30.4% to practically nothing during his tenure. Zitron goes as far as calling Raghavan a “career failure.”
At the end of his article, Zitron says:
Prabhakar Raghavan is a painful example of what happens when you allow the tech industry to be run by managers and management consultants who don’t use the things that make them rich. He’s responsible for killing search, and I want you to know his name.
