this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2026
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Oh, it’s so much worse than that, Google intentionally made it worse around 2019 so that people would do multiple searches and scroll to second pages, thus increasing the amount of ad impressions and user time spent on the site. There were several email back and forth between the head of search and head of advertising, with the head of search adamantly refusing to implement the changes. Eventually he ended up leaving despite having been at the company from the beginning due to this disagreement. The head of advertising during this? He’s the CEO now.
Replacing search altogether with AI summarization is just a continuation of that, instead of delaying customers going to other sites, prevent them from going to them all together.
That was sundar pichai? Or someone else? Do you know what terms I'd need to look up to find sources for that? Thats information I'd absolutely like to include when talking about this with people, thank you for filling me in, I had no idea about that and it adds a lot of substance to that point
Edit: from the provided link the person who killed google search was Prabhakar Raghavan, who was apparently responsible for yahoo search over the period in which it fell precipitously off a cliff. He was put in that role by sundar pichai, replacing someone who explicitly cared about search and was deeply important to search development and had been there since the beginning
So not Sundar pichai, but the article does explain that he was specifically picked to become the new head of search by sundar pichai, and that Sundar used to work for McKinsey Consulting, who were responsible for the business strategy that fueled the opioid crisis, among lots of other things. Super dense, but well worth the read!
Here you go
Thank you so much!! There were some details I wanted to clarify for people after reading so I edited my previous reply so folks can see a summary of some of the relevant points
I appreciate you getting me a link! This will be very helpful in explaining some of the rot in the search experience and adds a lot of additional weight to my suspicion that making search worse may also be happening to push ai adoption