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A comment on Judge Rules US v. Google Trial Documents Can Be Posted Online. Parent comment

Re:Judge Rules US v. Google Trial Documents Can Be Posted On... by jcranmer on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @01:16PM (#37677879)
The critical thing that appears to have happened is that a feature was rolled back because it hurt search queries. What feature it was is unclear from the email, since they never discuss it directly, but it was noted that users in the experiment were asking if it was a bug in public. Furthermore, the feature was newly added months prior.

So if I'm following it correctly, the email boils down to "please revert $POPULAR_CHANGE because it makes us less money on search ads, but don't tell people that's why we're doing it!"

(Someone who is a more diligent sleuth than I could probably figure out, but I don't know how to search Reddit for threads in ~April 2019 asking about bugs in Chrome related to features that launched ~October 2018.)

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Re:Judge Rules US v. Google Trial Documents Can Be Posted On... by jsnell on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @01:33PM (#37678126)
> The critical thing that appears to have happened is that a feature was rolled back because it hurt search queries.

Where are you getting there being a rollback? The earliest emails in the thread say there won't be a rollback, and the newest email asks for that decision to be reconsidered. Nowhere does it say that a rollback actually happened.

(The reddit thread isn't about a rollback, it's about an ablation experiment on a small % of users.)

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Re:Judge Rules US v. Google Trial Documents Can Be Posted On... by jcranmer on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @03:21PM (#37679869)
As I read it, the ablation experiment is the experiment seeing what would happen if they rolled back, rolled out on a small % of users.
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Re:Judge Rules US v. Google Trial Documents Can Be Posted On... by jsnell on Thursday September 28, 2023 @11:16AM (#37690806)
Sure, but that's not a rollback. That's just figuring out whether a rollout / which rollout caused a revenue drop. (It's basically as if they'd not done a 100% rollout in the first place, but kept a 1% holdout group. The point isn't to get more revenue from that 1%, it's to be able to measure long-term impact from the original change.)
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