The day Google started to get worse: “We are getting too close to money”

This article is a part of the weekly Technology newsletter, which is sent every Friday. If you want to sign up to receive it in its entirety, with similar topics, but more varied and brief, You can do it at this link.

“I am worried because at Google we only think about growth,” Ben Gomes, then head of the company’s search engine, wrote in an internal email in 2019. It was part of the open debate when a group of senior officials, who were very concerned because people were doing fewer searches, created a code yellow, the biggest internal alarm within Google: “This is important non-public information, do not share it,” they wrote.

One objective of that yellow code was to increase the number of searches on Google. The ultimate problem they wanted to solve was for users to see more ads to earn more advertising money. This email chain between Google executives has come to light thanks to the monopoly trial in which the company is immersed. Bloomberg reported these emails last fall and, a few days ago, an article in journalist Ed Zitron’s newsletter—titled The man who killed the Google search engineand based on those emails and new details—has sparked a huge debate in Silicon Valley.

This story delves into a growing controversy about how Google search has gotten worse. According to this narrative, the culprit would be clear: short-term money. In the email chain it is clearly seen how the Advertising department puts pressure on the Search department, which tries not to harm the user experience.

Since 2014, Google has maintained more than 90% market share in search engines. Now the arrival of AI and the deterioration of its responses puts that leadership in doubt. In March, at a meeting of all Google employees, vice president Prabhakar Raghavan—now in charge of the search engine and ads, among others— He warned that the good times were over: “We can agree that it is no longer like 15 or 20 years ago, things have changed. Life won’t be ‘all cool’ always,” Raghavan said.

Prabhakar Raghavan is precisely the figure accused by Zitron of having “killed the Google search engine”, for allegedly prioritizing economic benefit over good search results. The cause of a process as complex as sorting the web for billions of searches is difficult to limit to one figure. And, given the commotion caused by the article about Raghavan’s role, the company has been blunt in its response: “As we have definitively stated: the organic results, which you see in the search engine, are not affected by our advertising systems,” the company has responded.

But the debate in several emails, with the people in charge of the search engine trying to defend its integrity, suggests that the company was able to prioritize growth over user experience at various times.

The whole debate is fascinating, but there are several quotes that stand out. Shashi Thakur, who in 2019 was vice president of Engineering, Search and Discover, warned from the beginning that “there was a good reason for our founders to separate search from ads.” Then, in a more limited message to his team, he wrote: “I think finance people run around like headless chickens. I guess the ‘free ride’ is over and this is the first time they have to figure out how our business really works.”

The most cited phrases in these messages are from Ben Gomes, 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 objectives that are reasonable for his team, but that there should be a red line that is beginning to be crossed: “I think it is good that we aspire to grow in searches and have more users, but I think we are relating to the Advertising people too much for the good of the product and the company.”

It’s easy to reduce this debate to a single topic: more searches mean more ads and, therefore, more profits. Of course, from the user’s point of view, it is worse if you need three searches to find what once was enough. Google, as a product, would get worse; but the danger was not very great, with the almost monopoly it enjoyed.

Better one search than three

In an email that Gomes left in a draft—he only showed it to his team—he already pointed out what could happen: “We could increase searches quite easily, in the short term, in ways that are not good for users: deactivate spell checking, deactivate improvements in the ordering, fill out the settings page. If as a company we want to go down that path, we should discuss it. There may be trade-offs here between different types of user problems caused by tricks to increase interactions. But I have to say that this makes me very uncomfortable.” Gomes felt so “uncomfortable” that a year later he had left his position in favor of Raghavan, that he followed his rise at Google to this day.

In a discussion about this article on the forum Hacker Newsa kind of social network for Silicon Valley engineers, The most valued answer is from a former Google engineer, which explains how not money, but complexity, has eaten into the search: “I know a lot of veteran engineers were upset when Ben Gomes was sidelined. Probably the biggest change, from what I’ve heard, was losing Amit Singhal [quien lideró Búsqueda en Google hasta 2016]. Amit was struggling with increasing complexity. There is a semi-famous internal document he wrote where he argued against other Search leaders that Google should use less machine learning, or at least limit it as much as possible, so that the sorting would remain debuggable and understandable to human engineers.”

That engineer shares his impression that since Singhal left, complexity has exploded, with each team launching as many deep learning projects as they could, just like any other large company in the sector: “The old systems had obvious problems, while the old systems “Newer ones have hidden bugs and conceptual problems that are often not reflected in metrics, and that accumulate over time as more complexity is added.” Finally, he explains that he found an old bug that reordered 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. he.

To all this complexity we must add the thousands and thousands of SEO specialists who, on a daily basis, try to trick or confuse the Google algorithm so that it shows their results higher with the sole objective of achieving income from advertising or links to advertising platforms. e-commerce. These types of pages have gone from being reliable companies – that honestly tried to advise on which coffee maker or tent to buy – to pure spam. Everything is leading towards a perfect storm where one of the pillars of the 21st century, the Google search engine, glimpses the end of its days.

You can follow EL PAÍS Technology in Facebook and x or sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.

_