Ed Zitron wrote a piece named The Man Who Killed Google Search. It goes through in detail how Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s former head of ads – led a coup so that he could run Google Search, and how an email chain from 2019 began a cascade of events that would lead to him running it into the ground, he said.

Everyone in the SEO/SEM space is talking about this article and I came back to the SEO on fire. If you have not read it yet, you should.

I’ll include some posts from Ed Zitron:

In February 2019, Google’s ads and finance teams called a “code yellow” on search, because revenue was slow and – seriously – people were not asking Google enough questions. Ben Gomes, then head of search, refused to make Google Search worse for profit.https://t.co/ZpCanngMsO pic.twitter.com/KyoaKptQpN

— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) April 23, 2024

Gomes managed to help get Google through the code yellow – but Raghavan demanded more, saying Ben hadn’t increased queries enough. Gomes sent a letter to stating he was “deeply, deeply uncomfortable” with the ways that Google wanted to grow search.https://t.co/ZpCanngMsO pic.twitter.com/VZbr79yyRx

— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) April 23, 2024

Prabhakar Raghavan may be a computer scientist, but he joined Google in 2012 as a manager, working directly under CEO Sundar Pichai, a former McKinsey man. Raghavan is a class traitor that deliberately ran out Ben Gomes, who worked on search for 19 years.https://t.co/ZpCanngMsO pic.twitter.com/2HAKZbBdOd

— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) April 23, 2024

Prabhakar Raghavan is a career failure, a man who has fallen upwards into the most important job in software, and since becoming head of search in 2020, Google has become an ultra-profitable and increasingly less-useful site. Raghavan is a villain.https://t.co/ZpCanngMsO pic.twitter.com/lGwWApvYhq

— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) April 23, 2024

Anyway, here’s Raghavan from a few hours ago saying that the new operating reality of search is that they’ll have less time to do things! https://t.co/YcUAgAvSdY pic.twitter.com/u6PRu2PTv0

— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) April 23, 2024

Further context from an ex search engineer that shares a little more context about how things got so much worse for search technologicallyhttps://t.co/r3oolCh7N2 pic.twitter.com/wknLjTRGik

— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) April 24, 2024

Here are some of the many posts from our industry on this:

Heroes, Villains, Code Yellows, and more -> Emails released as part of US v. Google show how Google’s finance and ad teams led by Prabhakar Raghavan made Search worse to make the company more money

“The thread is a dark window into the world of growth-focused tech, where Thakur… pic.twitter.com/44q9d5tu7Y

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) April 24, 2024

To be fair, I’ve felt like we were in the Darkest Timeline for a long time now. pic.twitter.com/3E13xSi6as

— Keith Goode (@keithgoode) April 24, 2024

This article by @edzitron seems to have identified the dynamic behind Google’s quality degradation.

He makes some leaps and assumptions in painting Prabhakar Raghavan as the villain in the story – I think it is likely there are multiple villains. But, I think he has correctly… https://t.co/1ljJ7WDr8u

— Chris Silver Smith (@si1very) April 24, 2024

Extremely biased, but still fascinating. Also fundamental truth that the Google Founders attempt to isolate organic search within a bubble of fake academia is failing. The managers, and the lawyers, who have all the real power, are far more interested in cold cash.

— Ammon Johns♞ (@Ammon_Johns) April 24, 2024

SEOs – read this article. It’s got everything:

• Fantastic storytelling
• A savage take on a Google villain
• Validation for your most illicit SEO conspiracy theories (ads and search quality)
• Believable subtext for an ongoing Google narrative around the death of SEO https://t.co/Y7cUrVtEjX

— Garrett Sussman ☕️🔎 (@garrettsussman) April 24, 2024

And a lot more, see over here.

I am still digging out after two days, so I apologize not digging in more…

Forum discussion at X.