I bet Sundar Pitchai doesn't want to look bad as "CEO" who can't meet analyst expectations.
Whenever I see horrible search results, I often wonder if those people who work at Google, and surely use their own search engine as much as anyone else, have noticed the degradation and what they think of it --- especially those who are in charge of or even working on the search engine themselves. Does Sundar search, get horrible results, and think "Why is my search engine half-broken? This is my company's most prominent product, and it's not working as well as it used to." No doubt it affects all their engineers too, the ones who will tend to be looking for the most obscure things.
I think your point about metrics and revenue is very true --- they are numbers that can be easily compared, while the quality of search results is not (and also subject to a lot of different conditions); being a "data driven" company, they obviously place much emphasis on the former, ignoring the negative but not easily quantifiable effect on search quality.
As the catchy saying goes, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts." Unfortunately a lot of Google's management don't seem to believe in it.
Whenever I see horrible search results, I often wonder if those people who work at Google, and surely use their own search engine as much as anyone else, have noticed the degradation and what they think of it --- especially those who are in charge of or even working on the search engine themselves. Does Sundar search, get horrible results, and think "Why is my search engine half-broken? This is my company's most prominent product, and it's not working as well as it used to." No doubt it affects all their engineers too, the ones who will tend to be looking for the most obscure things.
I think your point about metrics and revenue is very true --- they are numbers that can be easily compared, while the quality of search results is not (and also subject to a lot of different conditions); being a "data driven" company, they obviously place much emphasis on the former, ignoring the negative but not easily quantifiable effect on search quality.
As the catchy saying goes, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts." Unfortunately a lot of Google's management don't seem to believe in it.