Wednesday, May 08, 2024

Who Killed Google Search?

Linked by Razib Khan, The Man Who Killed Google Search by Ed Zitron at his substack "Where's Your Ed At?

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.

I am not the least authority on this subject, so any of you with actual knowledge, feel free to share it here.

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