>>105824811this came out when they got sued by the government for being a monopoly
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
>Zitron tells the story of a boardroom struggle over search quality, in which Ben Gomes โ a long-tenured googler who helped define the company during its best years โ lost a fight with Prabhakar Raghavan, a computer scientist turned manager whose tactic for increasing the number of search queries (and thus the number of ads the company could show to searchers) was to decrease the quality of search. That way, searchers would have to spend more time on Google before they found what they were looking for.the root cause that google needs to keep showing growth to shareholders (otherwise they'll become a "mature" stock instead of a "growth" stock and suddenly appear grossly overvalued), but they basically have the entire search market to themselves which makes further userbase-driven growth impossible - if 8bn people are using google, you can't really bring it to more people. the only way you can get growth is to make people search more, and the way to make them search more is to fuck up search: if they don't find what they're looking for first try, they'll have to search again...