HOT: Journalist, Ed Zitron, revealed Indian man, Prabhakar Raghavan, destroyed Google search engine on Apple podcasts

Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that Journalist, Ed Zitron, revealed Indian man, Prabhakar Raghavan, destroyed Google search engine on Apple podcasts.

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.

In 2019, Google's ads team raised a "code yellow" alarm due to declining search revenue growth. This triggered a battle between the ads team, led by Prabhakar Raghavan, and the search team led by Ben Gomes. The ads team wanted to prioritize growth metrics over maintaining search quality. Gomes resisted, arguing that "growth is all that Google was thinking about" and that they shouldn't compromise user experience just to boost engagement.

Zitron, who used leaked emails and previous reporting, says that "Raghavan's relentless pursuit of 'queries with commercial intent' transformed Google Search from a neutral arbiter of information to an active purveyor of profit-driven content — a betrayal that sowed the seeds of the search giant's undoing."