this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2026
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Their later solution to this problem is interesting: for a long time the search and ad teams were entirely separate. The search team had one mission and that was to make Google search as good as possible. Selling ads and making money was someone else's task. The old reasoning of "Make a really good product and then the profit will follow". This is how Google search was able to outcompete all it's competitors.
Then 2019 rolled around, the Google Ads team failed to meet objectives, and they blamed Google search for their failure. Google's solution was to make search worse, reduce the visual difference between ads and results, and eventually put the ads guy officially in charge of search. The goal of Google search had changed from making the best search engine possible to optimizing ad views and clicks. This is one of the best documented stories of enshittification imo.
Good reads about this:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
https://codingwithcody.com/2025/10/search-is-dead-google-killed-it/
Didn't know this until you wrote your comment but 2019 is definitely when shit fell off so hard I rethought using Google at all
That sounds about right. I haven't used Google search is half a decade. Same with chrome.
There are so many better services out there today I'm surprised Google is still something people use
Some say that If you speak Prabhakar Raghavan's name three times while looking into a mirror Ed will appear
I laughed. It definitely feels like that when reading Ed's articles, the glee is almost palpable whenever he gets a chance to dish on Prabhakar.
TIL and wow
I think they also discovered they were charging companies for all the blocked ads nobody saw, and were about to get sued into oblivion, so they refunded a token amount, and threw ads into overdrive.
I think ads were never paid by the dished out links, but by the actual opens. sometimes even only by the click on it (impression vs click).
Google 'charges for YouTube adverts viewed by bots' Published 23 September 2015
I think this lead the charge to confirm you’re a human, i.e. age confirmation.
Interesting, I didn't know about this. Youtube isn't search however, Nibbler is right that advertisers in search only pay per click, not per impression.