To be fair the "old Google" mindset died off a decade or so ago during the big Google+ push when they feared an existential threat in Facebook. That threat never quite materialized, probably because FB are just as unsuccessful with their also-ran products as Google are with theirs, but Google still shook themselves up into a company I no longer admire.

For example (and sorry not trying to pick on any team in particular!) compare something like Google+ to Facebook Search, where the team had to actively make the UI worse to use to juice their metrics for FB's onerous performance reviews so they could keep their jobs and continue working on FB Search at all.

Does anyone remember back around the time that Graph Search was a big deal when you lost the ability to directly click on FB Search typeahead results, like starting to type a friend's name and clicking on the suggestion to go straight there? Requiring two clicks instead of one means every one of those searches now counts as a "full" search results page impression =p