A new email was leaked as part of the DOJ investigation, this was from Jerry Dischler, the Vice President of Google Ads. The email was to Prabhakar Raghavan, who leads up all of Google Search including Google Search and Google Ads but also to the leads of the Chrome team.
It seems to be asking primarily for the Chrome team to somehow “inject” “queries ASAP from Chrome.” The Google Ads team wants this to continue the “shaking the cushions” to find more revenue to hit revenue targets for the company. This was in addition to the raising ad prices in an auction bidding setting, for Google Ads to hit revenue targets.
The email goes on to also request “other ranking tweaks we can push out very quickly” from the Google team in order to improve ad revenue. It also does mention the mobile search redesign Google was about to release weeks later that “will be very revenue positive” according to the email.
It is a hard email to see and fully understand and it is shocking this email was sent in the first place.
Here is a copy of the email from @pdrmnvd on Twitter:
Here is the text of that email:
Thanks Anil for pushing your team and for being open to this whole line of thinking. Is there any chance we can converge on this more quickly? To elaborate:
Just looking at this very tactically, and sorry to go into this level of detail, but based on where we are I’m afraid it’s warranted. We are short % queries and are ahead on ads launches so are short -% revenue vs. plan. If we don’t hit plan, our sales team doesn’t get its quota for the second quarter in a row and we miss the street’s expectations again, which is not what Ruth signaled to the street so we get punished pretty badly in the market. We are shaking the cushions on launches and have some candidates in May that will help, but if these break in mid-late May we only get half a quarter of impact or less, which means we need**%+ excess to where we are today and can’t do it alone. The Search team is working together with us to accelerate a launch out of a new mobile layout by the end of May that will be very revenue positive (exact numbers still moving), but that still won’t be enough. Our best shot at making the quarter is if we get an injection of at least%, ideally, Redacted%, queries ASAP from Chrome. Some folks on our side are running a more detailed, Finance-blessed, what-if analysis on this and should be done with that in a couple of days, but I expect that these will be the rough numbers.
The question we are all faced with is how badly do we want to hit our numbers this quarter? We need to make this choice ASAP. I care more about revenue than the average person but think we can all agree that for all of our teams trying to live in high cost areas another fedacie in stock price loss will not be great for morale, not to mention the huge impact on our sales team.
I’m super proud of our pure approach at Google and don’t want to poison the culture of any team, and this is why I haven’t pushed harder. I also don’t want the message to be “we’re doing this thing because the Ads team needs revenue.” That’s a very negative message. But my question to all of you is – based on above – what do we think is the best decision for Google overall?
In that spirit, do we think it’s worth reconsidering a rollback? Or are there very scrappy tactical tweaks we can launch with holdback that we know will increase queries? (For example, can we increase vertical space between the search box/icons/feed on new tab to make search more prominent? Are there other ranking tweaks we can push out very quickly? Are there other entry points we haven’t focused on that we could push on soon?) Just to be clear, the reason I haven’t pushed harder on a rollback so far is because I don’t want the message to be.
Would love your thoughts and sorry for the long email.
Best,
-Jerry.
Again, it doesn’t seem like Search leads are on this email but it does imply search changes so I am not sure.
Don’t forget, Google has said numerous times that Google Search Quality does not talk to Google – ever.
Forum discussion at X.
