That plan is shrouded in a lot of business-speak, but it cashes out to this: by making search results worse, Google could force us to run multiple queries before we got the information we were seeking, and make more money by showing us more ads with every search-results page. In the memos, Gomes—a two-decade veteran of the company—is palpably horrified by Raghavan’s proposal to juice search queries by making the answers to each query worse. Gomes made his bones at Google by overseeing the scale-up of Google Search to run reliably on ever-larger server arrays—in other words, Gomes played a
...more
