Oh something happened.
Here's a news article from 10 days after that e-mail: https://www.ghacks.net/2019/05/14/fix-chrome-prioritizing-se...
tl;dr: Chrome started prioritizing previous searches over visited sites for suggestions in the omnibar.
To put a finer (more-explicit) point on that: That sounds like an attempt to keep people making google searches over and over merely to return to whatever search-result they already found in the past and wanted to see again.
It's true that not everything in the browser-history is what people want, but still... Imagine I searched for "monkey island ferry schedule" and picked the obviously-correct first result at "dot.monkey.gov/ferries". Boom, done, got it. Then if I want that information again tomorrow, why would I ever want to re-search, as opposed to just returning to the same result?
In contrast to all this Chrome stuff, let's imagine a browser that is utterly focused on the user's best-interests. With sufficient features/intelligence, it would actually do the exact opposite: "I notice every time you search any monkey/ferry stuff, you always stop once you get to that same result... So you probably always want exactly that page, therefore I should offer it prominently to help you avoid wasting time on unnecessary searches."
I could see there being a lot of queries where the search is the preferred thing to repeat.
The author seems to wonder what it has to do with Google drive to product, not realizing it’s Jerry from Google marketing driving you to go look at ads.
Makes you wonder what schemes the markers are dreaming up for LLM chat dialogue agents to start ‘driving’ us to profitable things.
My mental model and my job requires me to use a lot previous sites. I keep my history for a full year for that reason. I might need to go back to something I read 6 months ago. I know I read it. I know it’s out there. And I don’t use bookmarks because I never know if what I read right now might be useful in 3 months. Sure I can google it again, but then have to go through multiple results on google to try to remember the right one. And with the google algo, you never know which new garbage will show up on top
I did notice at some point that chrome would always try to send me back to google even if I knew it was in my history. Safari just shows me the previously visited site above everything.
Those emails confirm my suspicions. This was all about ads.
Google has so many cases where millions or even billions for all we know have had their productivity lowered purely because Google decided to do changes and or held back features for the sole reason that it would affect their ads revenue.
A simple reason why: if the Ad team reacted early in the approval process, the feature could have been canned at the design level and there would never have been this email exchange. Yet, the user would still be losing potential improvements due to the Ads team talking to the Chrome team.
Except it's way harder to argue on hypotheticals. And honestly, if we have this exchnage happening once, I'd assume the same level of intervention is happening a lot more, but without making waves, without explicit pleas and less drama.
Even at the day to day level, after this exchange happens I'd expect the Chrome team to either be wary of the ad impacts in their future features, or the Ad team to keep an eye on the Chrome roadmap to critically intervene whenever they see something that could even remotely affect them.
But it never happened -- the omnibox stayed -- so it doesn't seem like very good evidence to me. It actually shows the opposite -- that the product team built what was best for users in spite of opposition from sales.