The Code Yellow Papers: How Google Deliberately Made Search Worse

Google didn’t accidentally ruin search. It ran a code, got scared, and made a business decision to make search worse – because worse search prints money.

There’s a moment in the surfaced Department of Justice documents where Ben Gomes – the man who actually ran Google Search – says the quiet part out loud. “I’m worried that all Google cares about is growth.” He was right, and he lost the argument, and the entire internet has been paying for it ever since.

The code yellow

Around the early part of 2020, Google declared what it internally called a code yellow. In the polite financial vocabulary of the company, that meant “query weakness” – not enough people were asking Google questions anymore.

You might think: fine, Google’s job is to give you an answer. That’s the mistake. Google’s job is to show you ads. An answered query is a revenue opportunity burned. When query growth stalls, the machine panics.

And here’s the bind Google was in: it had 90% market share in search. You can’t juice query growth the honest way – raise a billion humans to maturity and make them Google customers (that’s a product called Google Classroom, and it doesn’t work fast). So when growth slowed, the company reached for the only lever left. The one that always works in the short run and always rots things in the long run:

Make Google worse so people spend more time fumbling around on Google.

The bad man in the room: Prabhakar Raghavan

In June 2020, a guy named Prabhakar Raghavan took over Google Search. He was formerly the head of ads. He pushed Ben Gomes to change how search worked – specifically to keep people on the platform longer.

The decay had actually started years earlier. Google had been slowly blurring the line between sponsored links and real results, to the point where telling them apart is now pretty much impossible – and most of the “results” are bad anyway. Raghavan’s mandate, which the DOJ documents line up with, was to reduce the quality of results: to let spammy, previously-pushed-down websites back up, so you’d fart around on Google longer, see more impressions, and watch “bing bong number go up.”

The man did so well at making growth go up that Google made him Chief Technologist – and then handed him Gemini, the AI, in the aftermath of the “Chinese George Washington / black Nazi” image-generation fiasco, where he had to take responsibility for a product that made a mockery of the company. It is not a charming man. He is, per the people who’ve dealt with him, just rude – and very good at being rude.

The fight nobody won

What’s genuinely chilling in these documents is the shape of the argument. For years at Google, these fights had played out with the side that wanted to make things better winning. Not this time.

• Ben Gomes’s argument (the technologist): If I made Google worse, I’d feel bad about my work and my life.
• Prabhakar Raghavan’s argument (the businessperson): If we make Google worse, we’ll make a lot more money.

And then there’s Jerry Dischler, now head of ads, delivering the corporate seance: “I’m not saying that revenue needs to control ads. However – we all have a shared reality.”

Read those lines back to back and you understand the rot. Gomes lost because “I’d feel bad about my work” is not a number. Raghavan won because “a lot more money” is a spreadsheet cell. In a company that big, with that much at stake, the spreadsheet always eats the conscience.

Ed Zitron has a name for the mindset that says if you can worsen something to make money, you should: the rot economy. Apt. It’s also the perfect description of what the DOJ papers reveal Google actually did.

The real cause is the policy, not the people

Here’s the part of the thesis worth sitting with. It was not because you “shopped wrong.” It was not because “you didn’t pay, so you became the product.” Google’s own customers – the advertisers paying its bills – aren’t spared the rot; they just get cheated more efficiently. This isn’t a freeloader tax. Degrading the product is the product. The “you didn’t pay” story is a myth.

It’s also not because Raghavan and Dischler and company are the wrong guys to be running the company. They are terrible people, sure – but the Zucker-Musk-ian mediocrities who run these companies are not smart enough to be causes. They are effects. They’re responding to an incentive environment created by policy.

In Google’s case, that policy is the one that oversaw, for decades, the serial acquisition of both vertical and horizontal competitors. Google built one genuinely successful consumer product – the search engine – a millennium ago, and has barely launched anything internally since. Everything else, they bought. They bought the shelf space until no other search engine could take root. They paid Apple more than $20 billion a year not to enter the search market and erode their margins.

They got too big to care.

Too big to care, and nobody’s responsible

This is the thing worth recovering. As right as Zitron is to be furious at Raghavan, there are people alive today – and some not so recently dead – who presided over the shifts in our policy environment. At the time, they were warned that the decisions they were contemplating would have the absolutely foreseeable effect of rewarding firms that did bad things to us. They took those decisions anyway. And today they’re hanging around polishing their fake Nobel prizes in economics and collecting six-figure consulting fees from blue chips – not held responsible at all, and not even worried that someone abroad might be sizing them up for a pitchfork.

The enshittification of Google was not a bug and not an accident. It was the predictable output of a policy environment built by people who knew exactly what they were doing – and who got rich, honored, and untouched for doing it.

The fix

You can’t shame a spreadsheet cell into growing a conscience. The only thing that changes a company with 90% market share that has decided its own product is the thing it can degrade for profit is a policy environment where that degradation is expensive – antitrust enforcement that actually prevents the serial acquisition of the shelf space, that stops the $20 billion bribe to Apple, that makes “too big to care” too expensive to maintain.

Ben Gomes worried Google only cared about growth. He was right. The only question left is whether our institutions still care about anything that isn’t a growth number – and whether anyone who made this mess will ever be held to account for it.

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Source: Excerpt from Better Offline – “Cory Doctorow and Ed Zitron on Enshittification and the Rot Economy”

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