Google’s 2019 ‘Code Yellow’ Blurred Line Between Search, Ads

The former head of search at Google told colleagues in February 2019 that his team was “getting too involved with ads for the good of the product and company,” according to emails shown at the Justice Department’s landmark antitrust trial against the company. Google maintains a firewall between its ads and search teams so that its engineers can innovate on Google’s search engine, unsullied by the influence of the team whose goal is to maximize advertising revenue. But in February 2019, Google internally declared a “Code Yellow” amid concerns the company might not meet its goals for search revenue for the quarter. As part of the emergency, which lasted for seven weeks, engineers from Google’s search and Chrome browser teams were reassigned to figure out why user queries had slowed.