Emails released as part of US vs. Google show how Google's finance and ad teams led by Prabhakar Raghavan made Search worse to make the company more money
This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it. — The story begins on February 5th 2019 …
Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed AtEdward Zitron
Context & Ripple Effects
The reported emails emerge from the US antitrust case after testimony framed Search’s success around engineering and innovation, including work on LLMs. They add an internal-management lens to that public account, while a 2019 “Code Yellow” response to slowing search queries had already put that period under scrutiny.
The claims also sit alongside state allegations that Google’s advertising business used opaque pricing practices affecting publishers and buyers. Together, the coverage makes the connection between Search quality, ad incentives, and market power more central to the case.
First-order effects
The email release gives the US case a potentially more concrete record for examining whether revenue objectives influenced Search product decisions, placing Google and Prabhakar Raghavan’s organization under sharper scrutiny.
Advertisers, publishers, and Search rivals gain a clearer factual basis to press whether monetization choices affected the quality and neutrality of results; that question complements prior state allegations over ad-market pricing practices.
Product teams across major platforms may face greater pressure to document how ranking, advertising, and quality metrics are separated when revenue goals conflict with user experience.
Third-order effects
If courts or regulators find that internal incentives systematically favored monetization over result quality, antitrust remedies could increasingly focus on the operational links between search ranking and ad businesses, not only distribution agreements.
The broader structural issue is whether general search can sustain user trust when the same platform controls discovery and the advertising systems that monetize attention; the record here is contested and legal findings remain decisive.
The trend: This is one data point in the widening scrutiny of how dominant search platforms reconcile user-value metrics with advertising-driven incentives.
This excellent piece by @edzitron indirectly highlights the fundamental problem w/ Google, Meta et al: These are public utilities that are run by for-profit companies. The public-interest side can only hold off the profit-focused folks for so long. 1/5 https://www.wheresyoured.at…
Today's newsletter is the story of how Prabhakar Raghavan, Google's former head of ads - led a coup so that he could run Google Search, and how an email chain from 2019 began a cascade of events that would lead to him running it into the ground. https://www.wheresyoured.at/ ...
Is it possible that advertising doesn't degrade the utility of everything it touches? (Google Search edition.) via @Frank Pasquale https://www.wheresyoured.at/ ...
Great post from @edzitron https://www.wheresyoured.at/ ... — I recently started paying for @KagiHQ and you know what, freaking worth it. Google used to have the best product around. Its decay and decline is a real loss for us all.
Wow! This thread and story here is 🤯 and might explain *a lot* about the quality and format evolution of Google SERPs 👀👇 full article here: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ ...
🔥 from @edzitron on how Google lost its way by taking the path more traveled. He also suggests McKinsey may “arguably be the most morally abhorrent company that's ever existed.” 🤔 More than Andreessen Horowitz who sells precarity as empowerment? https://www.wheresyoured.at/ ...
‘Raghavan is a hall-of-fame rot economist, and one of the many managerial types that have caused immeasurable damage to the Internet in the name of growth and “shareholder value.”’ Glad @edzitron put a name to the sad enshittification of Google. https://www.wheresyoured.at/ ...
Further context from an ex search engineer that shares a little more context about how things got so much worse for search technologically https://news.ycombinator.com/ ... [image]
“These emails tell a dramatic story about how Google's finance and advertising teams, led by Raghavan with the blessing of CEO Sundar Pichai, actively worked to make Google worse to make the company more money.” https://www.wheresyoured.at/ ...
This article about how the ads team at Google pressured the search team to make it harder to distinguish organic results from ads and roll back improvements that made people use search less is a fascinating behind the scenes of poser plays in big tech. https://www.wheresyoured.at…
Prabhakar Raghavan is a career failure, a man who has fallen upwards into the most important job in software, and since becoming head of search in 2020, Google has become an ultra-profitable and increasingly less-useful site. Raghavan is a villain. https://wheresyoured.at/... [im…