Where’s Your Ed Act via Metafilter – “Edward Zitron has been reading all of google’s internal emails that have been released as evidence in the DOJ’s antitrust case against google.  Zitron concludes that Google Search died on February 5th, 2019. It was on that date at Google’s HQ evil lair an emergency meeting, aka a “code yellow” was called by Prabhakar Raghavan, then Google’s Head of Ads. This was followed by a core update to search in March 2019 which resulted in search traffic getting directed back to web sites that had previously been suppressed by Google Search’s “Penguin” update (mefi fallout) from way back in 2012.  Just over a year later in June 2020 Google’s head of search Ben Gomes (previously), known as a key engineer with over 20 years of search development was replaced by Raghavan. Gnomes is on record arguing that search was “getting too involved with ads” (pdf of email), so Zitron tries to answer where Raghavan stands. Prior to working at Google Raghavan lead Yahoo’s search division, but not with the ascent of Yahoo. Raghavan’s tenure oversaw Yahoo going from around 30% share down to less than half which lead to Yahoo switching to using Bing for search. Zitron concludes its all in the service of short term corporate earning goals, regardless of impact on users.”

See also WSJ via MSN – Google Delays Cookie Phase-Out Following Regulatory Pushback. Move by search giant has major ramifications for $600 billion online ad industry.