Wanna listen to this story instead? Check out this week's Better Offline podcast, "The Man That Destroyed Google Search," available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.
This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it.
The story begins
The only gripe I have with this article is that I’m not convinced why the metric of “we want people to query more on Google” should be concerning to me. That just sounds like “we want more people to use our product more”, which is a completely reasonable metric for any business, no?
It’s a search engine, so if it’s taking you more queries than previously to find what you’re looking for, that means the quality of the search results has decreased.
Instead of the search team being able to focus on quality as they had been, they were more or less pushed to sabotage the quality of search in order to increase ad revenue.
It’s a search engine, so if it’s taking you more queries than previously to find what you’re looking for, that means the quality of the search results has decreased.
Instead of the search team being able to focus on quality as they had been, they were more or less pushed to sabotage the quality of search in order to increase ad revenue.
That’s my understanding, anyway.