Climbing the Ladder Isn’t the Same as Building Great Products

Edward Zitron’s “The Man Who Killed Google Search” spread quickly on Hacker News because it stitches together internal Google emails released during the U.S. Department of Justice antitrust trial. The threads show how Google’s vice presidents argued about search: some wanted to protect trust and long-term retention, others pushed to squeeze more money out of every results page.

Who Took Over Search

Zitron points a finger at Prabhakar Raghavan. He now runs Google Search and previously led Ads. Before Google he ran Yahoo Search from 2005 to 2012, the period when its market share slid from roughly 30% to 10%. In the emails you see Raghavan pressing on ad metrics while Ben Gomes (the engineer who spent two decades shaping Google Search) argues for user privacy and retention. Gomes joined in 1999, helped define the culture that made search dominant, and was eventually sidelined.

Former Googlers backed up the story on X. Their summary: Gomes treated search as a product that had to delight users; Raghavan treated it as an ad funnel. When the second mindset wins, revenue charts go up while the page gets noisier.

Climbing Ladders vs Serving Users

The unsettling part is that someone who presided over Yahoo’s decline still ended up running Google’s crown jewel. Being great at organisational navigation does not automatically mean you build great products. When promotions reward short-term monetisation, the experience degrades even if the team is full of talented engineers.

Choose Dashboards Carefully

Good leaders do more than stare at metrics; they choose what to measure. If the dashboard is wall-to-wall revenue, the team will sacrifice user trust to hit it. Ask what success looks like before you pour yourself into a roadmap. If you see a decision that hurts the user, speak up even if the spreadsheet glows green.

How We Apply It

At ExplainThis we keep the same guardrails. We have turned down ads that did not fit and focused on long-form, subscriber-supported work. The growth is slower, but we stay aligned with readers instead of chasing the biggest banner slot.

Titles tell you who won the internal politics. Listening to users tells you who is actually building something worth keeping.