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

Edward Zitron has been reading all of google’s internal emails that have been released as evidence in the DOJ’s antitrust case against google.

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.

HackerNews thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976

MetaFilter thread: https://www.metafilter.com/203456/The-core-query-softness-continues-without-mitigation

  • rigattiEnglish
    1282·
    6 months ago

    Really weird to stumble onto a blog written by someone you vaguely knew in college almost 20 years ago… Anyway, nice job, Ed Zitron.

    • TerkErJerbsEnglish
      380·
      6 months ago

      He has a podcast too called Better Offline. Just started it up a few months ago.

    • BrutticusEnglish
      160·
      6 months ago

      I know the feeling. I went to middle school with Hillel Wayne

    • livusEnglish
      140·
      6 months ago

      I’d never heard of Ed Zitron but this is the second good blog I’ve seen by them this week.