Comment by nonameiguess | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonameiguess | Hacker News Reader

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Damn. Am I reading this correctly? Jerry here is asking Anil to make search results shittier on purpose so users will have to make more queries so ads get more impressions? All because they decided to tie employee compensation to the whims of quarterly earnings reports. I at least understand why on that last piece, given any attempt at quantitatively estimating long-term value creation at the time of creation is effectively impossible. Still interesting to see the tail so explicitly wagging the dog, though, with a manager all but saying fuck the users, our salespeople need their bonuses.

I'm not claiming I know an answer here, given Amazon's attempt at the opposite fuck employees, do everything possible to please customers hasn't really worked out, either.

If the FTC and US court system have any backbone, I guess hopefully the answer is stop letting single companies get this powerful. The market can only help if there's actually a market.

And I guess quit it with the mandatory return-to-office policies so your employees don't have to live in high cost of living areas and maybe missing a quarter or two's targets and having to take home 600k instead of 800k one year won't be life-destroying.

> Jerry here is asking Anil to make search results shittier on purpose so users will have to make more queries so ads get more impressions?

As we've all noticed from the shittier Google results the last several years, this has been known. The surprising part is that this communication was not done over the phone or some other secretive non-transcripted way. At least this time. Amateur-hour on Jerry's part.

> The surprising part is that this communication was not done over the phone or some other secretive non-transcripted way.

That only works if the other party is already willing to do what you want. "I'll need that in writing" is the root password for avoiding these kinds of requests.

You mean users click more Ads when they are the only sane option besides the worse "normal search results"?

Anil's on the Chrome team, they don't control search results. I think they are talking about increasing the address bar's preference to search instead of giving you local results (history and bookmarks). They could also be talking about specific queries, e.g. with Chrome's default settings, the address bar can answer some queries like weather or calculator using search without having to press Enter.

> They could also be talking about specific queries, e.g. with Chrome's default settings, the address bar can answer some queries like weather or calculator using search without having to press Enter.

I'm almost certain it's this - that was added in Chrome 69 [0] which was released ~7 months prior which lines up with the email thread.

[0] - https://venturebeat.com/business/chrome-69-arrives-with-reva...

My take is that this all refers to another doc with that ITEM 7 in it. I think these are interface tweaks to Chrome that will drive more search volume, but negatively impact Chrome UX. Chrome team is pushing back, b/c they don’t want their app to suck, but Ruth needs to hit her number.

A great example of this is how they merged the search box into the address bar, to create the "omnibar." Since then, they've aggressively promoted submitting a new Google search for whatever you're typing in, instead of returning results from your local browser bookmarks, history, etc that wouldn't generate more ad impressions.

Omnibar seems to be what this is about. At one point they note that there’s a Reddit thread that thinks their a/b test is a bug.

Which Firestorm had years ago, as the "awesome bar".

If I am reading this document correctly, the changes consists of rolling out new features such as mapping search terms to entities.

While I understand the frustrations people have with Google search, these changes in itself don't seem that bad, although I do agree that pursuing revenue as your sole purpose definitely can lead you astray.

It's the philosophy behind them. Let's say Google Search improved relevance by showing less low quality sites. However what if those sites also showed a lot of Google Display Ads and thus generated a lot of ad revenue for Google versus other sites. Given this email it's very possible that such a change would get rolled back or discouraged due to the drop on Google revenue from it.

If there had been such a change or a discussion about whether to make such a change, presumably that'd be what the DoJ would have used as evidence instead of this.

The DOJ can't magically pull out a time machine to record conversations that happened but were never written down.

The critical thing that appears to have happened is that a feature was rolled back because it hurt search queries. What feature it was is unclear from the email, since they never discuss it directly, but it was noted that users in the experiment were asking if it was a bug in public. Furthermore, the feature was newly added months prior.

So if I'm following it correctly, the email boils down to "please revert $POPULAR_CHANGE because it makes us less money on search ads, but don't tell people that's why we're doing it!"

(Someone who is a more diligent sleuth than I could probably figure out, but I don't know how to search Reddit for threads in ~April 2019 asking about bugs in Chrome related to features that launched ~October 2018.)

> The critical thing that appears to have happened is that a feature was rolled back because it hurt search queries.

Where are you getting there being a rollback? The earliest emails in the thread say there won't be a rollback, and the newest email asks for that decision to be reconsidered. Nowhere does it say that a rollback actually happened.

(The reddit thread isn't about a rollback, it's about an ablation experiment on a small % of users.)

As I read it, the ablation experiment is the experiment seeing what would happen if they rolled back, rolled out on a small % of users.

Sure, but that's not a rollback. That's just figuring out whether a rollout / which rollout caused a revenue drop. (It's basically as if they'd not done a 100% rollout in the first place, but kept a 1% holdout group. The point isn't to get more revenue from that 1%, it's to be able to measure long-term impact from the original change.)

> Jerry here is asking Anil to make search results shittier on purpose so users will have to make more queries so ads get more impressions?

ah but it's fine because he's "super proud of our pure approach here at Google"

and he doesn't want the message to be "Ads team needs revenue" because "that's a very negative message"

jesus, what an asshole

I've never felt about better blocking all ads and switching off every single Google product

I think at this point it's beyond likely that Manifest V3 and WEI and a product of this sort of thinking to stop adblocking

Some high cost of living areas wouldn't be without all the offices!

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