because (a) it's trivially growth-hacked by making it suck (b) they did in fact growth-hack it by making it suck, and presumably this was obvious to many involved.

“we want people to query more on Google” should be concerning to me

one reading of it could be "we want people to spend more time on our web properties" with the implied "(and less on anyone else's)". and it does, at least in what was observed on google's actions, bear out over the past few years

(and then also the bit that david said)

The only gripe I have with this article is that I’m not convinced why the metric of “we want people to query more on Google” should be concerning to me. That just sounds like “we want more people to use our product more”, which is a completely reasonable metric for any business, no?

It's a search engine, so if it's taking you more queries than previously to find what you're looking for, that means the quality of the search results has decreased.

Instead of the search team being able to focus on quality as they had been, they were more or less pushed to sabotage the quality of search in order to increase ad revenue.

That's my understanding, anyway.

Well there are two ways to look at improving software (in this case), either we should improve the effectiveness of the tool to do its primary function. Or we should make it sticky so people get forced to use it no matter what to increase our profits.

In video games it would be if an AAA manager suddenly goes 'we should become more like mobile/facebook games'.

And as we have seen what happened to google, (isn't it 20/20) we know what he meant with that. The context is important here.

It has certainly worked, more and more times I notice that I need to add additional words to my searched because it keeps finding stuff I don't care about, and god forbid if you pick a search term that their internal system can map into a sellable product. (A while back I was searching for something and it kept deciding that one of the words was also related to a drink (even if I didn't search for that term specifically) so all my results were commercial drink related stuff. You know the thing where google turns a part of the search result bold to show you that was why you got the result).

I read it more as "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?"