I'm sure the search team can, erm,google for the ad revenue figures in the earnings release.

After reading the anti trust filing it’s hard to argue Google is anything else but evil and a lot of what it does is to hide its monopoly.

Apropos of anything else, Google is famous for a "monorepo". Any team can see the underlying architecture of things, regardless of any supposed "aggressive firewall" alluded to above.

A monorepo does not let you deduce the revenue consequences of experiments, but regardless, even if you could figure it out, it isn't part of the incentive structure.

You think the search team runs an experiment once per 3 months to test how their algorithm ideas impact earnings?

The company isn't a charity. If a search change demonstrably has a negative effect on company earnings (even if users like it) it will almost certainly be reversed. I don't think they run an experiment once every three months, I think they are testing continuously, including A/B testing (some users get the change, others don't,).

> If a search change demonstrably has a negative effect on company earnings (even if users like it) it will almost certainly be reversed.

This is completely false. I've personally been involved in launching ranking changes that negatively impacted revenue substantially. I didn't find out until months later through the grapevine, and only in vague terms like "ads had to scramble." Versions of them remain in production today. Revenue projections were never considered as part of the launch decision, nor have they they been consulted as part of evaluating subsequent versions.

Perhaps this has gone too far, as others have noted, there are so many ads and Google generated content (esp. YouTube links) that the organic search results are practically on the second page.

If Googlers were allowed to consider revenue in the search results perhaps they wouldn't have been so easily down graded to a second class citizen.

You can find public examples where the opposite has been done.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda

> In 2016, Matt Cutts, Google's head of webspam at the time of the Panda update, commented that "with Panda, Google took a big enough revenue hit via some partners that Google actually needed to disclose Panda as a material impact on an earnings call. But I believe it was the right decision to launch Panda, both for the long-term trust of our users and for a better ecosystem for publishers."

Disclosure I work at Google.

I doubt the ad organization and ranking teams decide where and how many sponsored listings appear in search results, which I believe is GP's point: the page design/layout and the proportions of ads vs. (more or less) organic listings. Someone decides that searches have e.g. four ads at the top and two at the bottom.

I’m... skeptical about this firewall

If you believe this I would love to sell you an extremely expensive bridge.