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If I am reading this document correctly, the changes consists of rolling out new features such as mapping search terms to entities. While I understand the frus

If I am reading this document correctly, the changes consists of rolling out new features such as mapping search terms to entities. While I understand the frustrations people have with Google search, these changes in itself don't seem that bad, although I do agree that pursuing revenue as your sole purpose definitely can lead you astray.

marcinzm 3y ago
It's the philosophy behind them. Let's say Google Search improved relevance by showing less low quality sites. However what if those sites also showed a lot of Google Display Ads and thus generated a lot of ad revenue for Google versus other sites. Given this email it's very possible that such a change would get rolled back or discouraged due to the drop on Google revenue from it.
- jsnell 3y ago
  If there had been such a change or a discussion about whether to make such a change, presumably that'd be what the DoJ would have used as evidence instead of this.
  - marcinzm 3y ago
    The DOJ can't magically pull out a time machine to record conversations that happened but were never written down.
jcranmer 3y ago
The critical thing that appears to have happened is that a feature was rolled back because it hurt search queries. What feature it was is unclear from the email, since they never discuss it directly, but it was noted that users in the experiment were asking if it was a bug in public. Furthermore, the feature was newly added months prior. So if I'm following it correctly, the email boils down to "please revert $POPULAR_CHANGE because it makes us less money on search ads, but don't tell people that's why we're doing it!" (Someone who is a more diligent sleuth than I could probably figure out, but I don't know how to search Reddit for threads in ~April 2019 asking about bugs in Chrome related to features that launched ~October 2018.)
- jsnell 3y ago
  > The critical thing that appears to have happened is that a feature was rolled back because it hurt search queries. Where are you getting there being a rollback? The earliest emails in the thread say there won't be a rollback, and the newest email asks for that decision to be reconsidered. Nowhere does it say that a rollback actually happened. (The reddit thread isn't about a rollback, it's about an ablation experiment on a small % of users.)
  - jcranmer 3y ago
    As I read it, the ablation experiment is the experiment seeing what would happen if they rolled back, rolled out on a small % of users.
    - jsnell 3y ago
      Sure, but that's not a rollback. That's just figuring out whether a rollout / which rollout caused a revenue drop. (It's basically as if they'd not done a 100% rollout in the first place, but kept a 1% holdout group. The point isn't to get more revenue from that 1%, it's to be able to measure long-term impact from the original change.)

marcinzm 3y ago

It's the philosophy behind them. Let's say Google Search improved relevance by showing less low quality sites. However what if those sites also showed a lot of Google Display Ads and thus generated a lot of ad revenue for Google versus other sites. Given this email it's very possible that such a change would get rolled back or discouraged due to the drop on Google revenue from it.

jsnell 3y ago
If there had been such a change or a discussion about whether to make such a change, presumably that'd be what the DoJ would have used as evidence instead of this.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  The DOJ can't magically pull out a time machine to record conversations that happened but were never written down.

jcranmer 3y ago

The critical thing that appears to have happened is that a feature was rolled back because it hurt search queries. What feature it was is unclear from the email, since they never discuss it directly, but it was noted that users in the experiment were asking if it was a bug in public. Furthermore, the feature was newly added months prior. So if I'm following it correctly, the email boils down to "please revert $POPULAR_CHANGE because it makes us less money on search ads, but don't tell people that's why we're doing it!" (Someone who is a more diligent sleuth than I could probably figure out, but I don't know how to search Reddit for threads in ~April 2019 asking about bugs in Chrome related to features that launched ~October 2018.)

jsnell 3y ago
> The critical thing that appears to have happened is that a feature was rolled back because it hurt search queries. Where are you getting there being a rollback? The earliest emails in the thread say there won't be a rollback, and the newest email asks for that decision to be reconsidered. Nowhere does it say that a rollback actually happened. (The reddit thread isn't about a rollback, it's about an ablation experiment on a small % of users.)
- jcranmer 3y ago
  As I read it, the ablation experiment is the experiment seeing what would happen if they rolled back, rolled out on a small % of users.
  - jsnell 3y ago
    Sure, but that's not a rollback. That's just figuring out whether a rollout / which rollout caused a revenue drop. (It's basically as if they'd not done a 100% rollout in the first place, but kept a 1% holdout group. The point isn't to get more revenue from that 1%, it's to be able to measure long-term impact from the original change.)