From Ed Zitron's substack, Where's Your Ed At?,
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.
For those unfamiliar with Google’s internal scientology-esque jargon, let me explain. A “code yellow” isn’t, as you might think, a crisis of moderate severity. The yellow, according to Steven Levy’s tell-all book about Google, refers to — and I promise that I’m not making this up — the color of a tank top that former VP of Engineering Wayne Rosing used to wear during his time at the company. It’s essentially the equivalent of DEFCON 1 and activates, as Levy explained, a war room-like situation where workers are pulled from their desks and into a conference room where they tackle the problem as a top priority. Any other projects or concerns are sidelined.
In emails released as part of the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google, Dischler laid out several contributing factors — search query growth was “significantly behind forecast,” the “timing” of revenue launches was significantly behind, and a vague worry that “several advertiser-specific and sector weaknesses” existed in search.
I should note that I’ve previously — and erroneously — referred to the “code yellow” as something that Gomes raised as a means of calling attention to the proximity of Google’s ads side getting too close to search. The truth is much grimmer — the Code Yellow was the rumble of the Rot Economy, with Google’s revenue arm sounding the alarm that its golden goose wasn’t laying enough eggs. Gomes, a Googler of 19 years that built the foundation of modern search engines, should go down as one of the few people in tech that actually fought for a real principle, destroyed by and replaced with Prabhakar Raghavan, a computer scientist class traitor that sided with the management consultancy sect. More confusingly, one of the problems was that there was insufficient growth in “queries,” as in the amount of things people were asking Google. It’s a bit like if Ford decided that things were going poorly because drivers weren’t putting enough miles on their trucks.Anyway, a few days beforehand on February 1 2019, Kristen Gil, then Google’s VP Business Finance Officer, had emailed Shashi Thakur, then Google’s VP of Engineering, Search and Discover, saying that the ads team had been considering a “code yellow” to “close the search gap [it was] seeing,” vaguely referring to how critical that growth was to an unnamed “company plan.” To be clear, this email was in response to Thakur stating that there is “nothing” that the search team could do to operate at the fidelity of growth that ads had demanded.
(Editor’s note: If you read those emails, start from the bottom and work your way up).Shashi forwarded the email to Gomes, asking if there was any way to discuss this with Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, and declaring that there was no way he’d sign up to a “high fidelity” business metric for daily active users on search. Thakur also said something that I’ve been thinking about constantly since I read these emails: that there was a good reason that Google’s founders separated search from ads.
On February 2, 2019, just one day later, Thakur and Gomes shared their anxieties with Nick Fox, a Vice President of Search and Google Assistant, entering a multiple-day-long debate about Google’s sudden lust for growth. The thread is a dark window into the world of growth-focused tech, where Thakur listed the multiple points of disconnection between the ads and search teams, discussing how the search team wasn’t able to finely optimize engagement on Google without “hacking engagement,” a term that means effectively tricking users into spending more time on a site, and that doing so would lead them to “abandon work on efficient journeys.” In one email, Fox adds that there was a “pretty big disconnect between what finance and ads want” and what search was doing.
When Gomes pushed back on the multiple requests for growth, Fox added that all three of them were responsible for search, that search was “the revenue engine of the company,” and that bartering with the ads and finance teams was potentially “the new reality of their jobs.”
On February 6th 2019, Gomes said that he believed that search was “getting too close to the money,” and ended his email by saying that he was “concerned that growth is all that Google was thinking about.”
On March 22 2019, Google VP of Product Management Darshan Kantak would declare the end of the code yellow. The thread mostly consisted of congratulatory emails until Gomes responded congratulating the team, saying that the plans architected as part of the code would do well throughout the year.
Prabhakar Raghavan, then Google’s Head of Ads and the true mastermind behind the code yellow, would respond curtly, saying that the current revenue targets were addressed “by heroic RPM engineering” and that “core query softness continued without mitigation” — a very clunky way of saying that despite these changes, query growth wasn’t happening.