I think you may be falling for the SV cult of personality fallacy. There are still literally thousands of individuals you've never heard of working on organic search quality at Google who care very much about quality organic results. :)

So yeah I totally agree, be it Google, Apple, Microsoft, ... A large amount of people around here are so used to small team startup represented by their founder that they always feel the need in similar stories to make a cult of personality for / against someone as if he was the product he worked for.

Edit: And, I did mention more focus on ads and widgets versus the actual organic results. If those weren't more important, why are they at the top, crowding organics down? The revenue isn't really coming from the organics themselves.

(And while Google keeps adding heuristics I wish some of those many developers and researchers would simply occasionally try the product and ban, purge the very obvious content farm and spam sites)

I hear that Google search has largely moved to machine learning techniques. When I was there in 2005-2009 there was a bunch of hand-tuned stuff, and hand-tuning was definitely Amit's preferred strategy at the time. One side effect might be that a machine learning black box has fewer big, externally-perceptible shifts. It also just might require less ongoing interesting engineering work. Hard to say, though.

Edit: I wonder if Amit changed his tune regarding machine learning, at least for his new space.

And KGs aren't mutually exclusive with ML -- e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.04844

Do they care less than they used to, though? Their placement on the screen as opposed to KG, widgets, and ads..and how that's progressed over time, seems to imply it.

It has done this by a) Actually improving its spammy backlink detection, and b) Scary webmasters away from spammy SEO tactics through sudden updates like Panda/Penguin and straight up propaganda.

Once you solve the spam issue, Google's search results organically become better. Ergo, it doesn't need to spend that much time monitoring and improving them

I wonder how much they actually improved the webspam thing.

The search results you see today, versus years past, suggest a sort of "cheat" to do that...something like a seed set of trusted sites (big brands, universities, government sites, etc) , and weighting based on distance from those seeds.

I say that because I'll often get results that are heavy on authority, but low on relevance. What I'm looking for is on pages 2 and 3, on more niche, less prominent sites. It didn't used to be that way.

That's impossible to measure, but the arguments you have employed regarding personnel changes do not demonstrate your point.

What of the decision to not replace Matt with a specific role or person? Is that not interesting?

And, again, I mentioned many other observations, not just Amit and Matt.

Edit: If the primary driver was lack of expertise in the ML direction, Uber seems an odd place to land, doesn't it?

I work for Google but this is pure speculation on my part.

Again, Amit may not have been aligned with the direction they're taking search. That doesn't mean Google doesn't care. In fact, it could mean just the opposite.

http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/02/uber-is-rolling-out-a-big-...

https://newsroom.uber.com/inferring-uber-rider-destinations/

There's other references, but you get the idea.

c) "Search" is changing towards giving information rather than to websites.

Think Siri/Cortana/Alexa. Even Google tries to give you an answer rather than a website.

Also information is moving from "spread thin" websites to social graphs and more centralised locations

Personally, at this point I'd rather pay Google a monthly subscription and get everything ad-free. That would align their interests with their users who would then be the customers vs the product and free up Google to do what is best for them in cases where ads may not make sense.

Is there an analog to this? Is there another market where marketshare has "been decided"? My instinct tells me that companies who fall for this are in trouble.

Edit: Yes, mobile is hitting desktop, but that's the market itself changing...not the market share for desktop. Comparable in the search space is more people using Amazon directly for product searches versus starting with Google. Related markets and effects, but Amazon isn't a general search competitor.

Guess this is the point where we short Alphabet?

Google might be still all in on search, but what's important here is the outside perception. They won the search war and desperately tried to recreate the success with other products. So far they haven't had another hit (some big misses, though).

If you're asking for non-ads products that have done pretty well -- Android, Youtube, Cloud doing pretty well.

Next possible moneymaker is Waymo.

The replies mostly seem to be saying that I'm equating just the two departures with a declining interest at Google in organic result quality. Of course, I mentioned more than that, but it's an easy way to dismiss me versus educating me on how I've got it wrong.