Ed Zitron

The thread mostly consisted of congratulatory emails, until Gomes made the mistake of responding congratulating everyone, saying that the plans architected as part of the Code Yellow would do well throughout the year.

Enter Prabhakar Raghavan, then Google's head of ads and the true mastermind behind the code yellow, who would respond curtly, saying that the current revenue targets were addressed by heroic RPM engineering and that the core query softness continued without mitigation. A very clunky way of saying that despite these changes, query growth was not happening at the rate he needed it to.

Enter Prabhakar Raghavan, then Google's head of ads and the true mastermind behind the code yellow, who would respond curtly, saying that the current revenue targets were addressed by heroic RPM engineering and that the core query softness continued without mitigation. A very clunky way of saying that despite these changes, query growth was not happening at the rate he needed it to.

Enter Prabhakar Raghavan, then Google's head of ads and the true mastermind behind the code yellow, who would respond curtly, saying that the current revenue targets were addressed by heroic RPM engineering and that the core query softness continued without mitigation. A very clunky way of saying that despite these changes, query growth was not happening at the rate he needed it to.

A day later, Gomes emailed Fox and Thakur an email he intended to send to Ragavan. He led by saying that he was annoyed both personally and on behalf of the search team.

A day later, Gomes emailed Fox and Thakur an email he intended to send to Ragavan. He led by saying that he was annoyed both personally and on behalf of the search team.

A day later, Gomes emailed Fox and Thakur an email he intended to send to Ragavan. He led by saying that he was annoyed both personally and on behalf of the search team.

In this very long email, he explained in arduous detail how one might increase engagement with Google Search, but specifically added that they could increase queries quite easily in the short term, but only in user-negative ways, like turning off spell correction or ranking improvements or placing refinements, effectively labels, all over the page, adding that it was possible that there are trade-offs here between the different kinds of user negativity caused by engagement hacking, and that he was deeply, deeply uncomfortable with this.

In this very long email, he explained in arduous detail how one might increase engagement with Google Search, but specifically added that they could increase queries quite easily in the short term, but only in user-negative ways, like turning off spell correction or ranking improvements or placing refinements, effectively labels, all over the page, adding that it was possible that there are trade-offs here between the different kinds of user negativity caused by engagement hacking, and that he was deeply, deeply uncomfortable with this.

In this very long email, he explained in arduous detail how one might increase engagement with Google Search, but specifically added that they could increase queries quite easily in the short term, but only in user-negative ways, like turning off spell correction or ranking improvements or placing refinements, effectively labels, all over the page, adding that it was possible that there are trade-offs here between the different kinds of user negativity caused by engagement hacking, and that he was deeply, deeply uncomfortable with this.

He also added that this was the reason he didn't believe that queries, as in the amount of things with people searching on Google, were a good metric to measure search, and that the best defense against the weaknesses of queries was to create compelling user experiences that make users want to come back. Crazy idea there. What if the product was good? Not good enough for Prabhaka.

He also added that this was the reason he didn't believe that queries, as in the amount of things with people searching on Google, were a good metric to measure search, and that the best defense against the weaknesses of queries was to create compelling user experiences that make users want to come back. Crazy idea there. What if the product was good? Not good enough for Prabhaka.

He also added that this was the reason he didn't believe that queries, as in the amount of things with people searching on Google, were a good metric to measure search, and that the best defense against the weaknesses of queries was to create compelling user experiences that make users want to come back. Crazy idea there. What if the product was good? Not good enough for Prabhaka.

So a little bit of history about Google here. They regularly throughout the year do core updates to search. These are updates that change the algorithm that say, okay, we're going to suppress this kind of thing. We can elevate this kind of thing. And they are actually the reason that search changes. It's why certain sites suddenly disappear or reappear. It's why sites get a ton of traffic.

So a little bit of history about Google here. They regularly throughout the year do core updates to search. These are updates that change the algorithm that say, okay, we're going to suppress this kind of thing. We can elevate this kind of thing. And they are actually the reason that search changes. It's why certain sites suddenly disappear or reappear. It's why sites get a ton of traffic.

So a little bit of history about Google here. They regularly throughout the year do core updates to search. These are updates that change the algorithm that say, okay, we're going to suppress this kind of thing. We can elevate this kind of thing. And they are actually the reason that search changes. It's why certain sites suddenly disappear or reappear. It's why sites get a ton of traffic.

Some don't get any and so on and so forth, but they do a lot of them. The one that's really interesting, I'm a little bastard and I went and looked through pretty much the last decade of these.

Some don't get any and so on and so forth, but they do a lot of them. The one that's really interesting, I'm a little bastard and I went and looked through pretty much the last decade of these.

Some don't get any and so on and so forth, but they do a lot of them. The one that's really interesting, I'm a little bastard and I went and looked through pretty much the last decade of these.

The one that stood out to me was the March 2019 core update to search, which happened about a week before the end of the code yellow, meaning that it's very likely that this was a result of Prabhakar's bullshit. So this was expected to be one of the largest updates to search in a very long time, and I'm quoting Search Engine Journal there.