Google search has reportedly deteriorated in recent years

Due to an internal power struggle, according to the podcast.

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A power struggle in Google has led to the search service being weakened and the advertisements more numerous, claims the technology journalist Edward Zitron.

In the Better Offline podcast, Zitron talks about how an internal dispute at Google in 2019 is said to have led to the user experience of Google’s search service becoming worse, because the company wanted to make more money from advertising.

By reading internal email correspondence from the company, which has been made public as a result of a lawsuit with the US Department of Justice, Zitron has traced it all back to a crisis meeting in 2019.

Here, the then head of advertising at Google, Jerry Dischler, is said to have expressed that the advertising revenues did not reach the target figures they had set. In other words, they didn’t make enough money from advertising. He is said to have thrown the ball to the search manager, Ben Gomes, who he believed had to do something about this.

This set off the warning lights for Gomes, who along with another colleague, sent an email to Nick Fox, the senior manager of search and Google Assistant. In the email, Gomes is said to have expressed concern that what the advertising side of the company wanted, i.e. more page views, was not compatible with the search experience.

They argued that to achieve what Dischler wanted, the search developers would in practice have to “hack” the user experience by messing with the search results, so that users would have to try out multiple search terms to find the right content.

More advertising, less search

It must have apparently had consequences, because in the e-mail dialogues it appears that Gomes feels that he has been heard, and that the battle has been won.

But the problem of lack of advertising revenue persisted. Then head of the advertising side, Prabhakar Raghavan wrote only a short time later that the basic problem of weak growth in the number of searches was still present.

Gomes is said to have reacted to this, and in an email to Raghavan he criticizes what he claims is an attempt to manipulate search results to increase traffic, at the expense of the user experience. Instead, he thought it was a better idea to lure users back by improving the search service itself.

But in May 2019, Google still released a change to the search results, which made advertising more visible.

Zitron claims the poorer search results are due to both Raghavan and CEO Sundar Pichai, but also to a corporate culture where growth has become a more important goal than anything else.

Losing the battle against pure spam

In a recent survey, carried out by German researchers, it is confirmed that searches have actually become worse.

– We can conclude that higher ranked pages are, on average, more optimized and generate more revenue affiliate Check Switch affiliateProduct links that generate revenue for the website if someone clicks on them-marketing, and shows signs of lower text quality, the researchers write in the survey.

The researchers reviewed search results for 7,392 product reviews on Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo, and found that despite the fact that product reviews with affiliate marketing online are low, it is still used in the majority of search results.

The reason is that the search engines have problems with highly optimized affiliate content, the researchers explain. All websites do everything they can to optimize to reach the top on Google. But this also means that they allow themselves to be “fooled” by players who run spam campaigns, writes The Register.

Based on these findings, the German researchers therefore conclude that the search result pages are of poorer quality.

Used to be Yahoo’s head of search

It also adds to the story that five months later Prabhakar Raghavan took over the job as head of development of the search services, while Ben Gomes was awarded the title of “Senior Vice President of Education”, without having any real influence on the search service he helped build over 19 year, writes Swelockers.

Prabhakar Raghavan’s previous job was as head of search at Yahoo from 2005 to 2021, which, according to Zitron, is the same period their search service shrank from 30 to 13 percent in search market share.