What precisely are a few emails from employees supposed to show about the company? I mean, seriously WSJ. What if some employees sent around emails saying they approved of cannibalism, would people be like "Google is about to start eating humans!"
And in my experience as a current employee, it sure seems so. Just as someone who left years ago can juice attention and their job prospects by writing a Medium.com post or making a YouTube video referencing once working at Google, it's increasingly tedious to see anything done internally, most of which is kind of boring, reported with excitement.
But again, congratulations to whatever dumb leaker wanted to make a point out of some random email this week.
Source: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204418...
I work at Google, although I have no idea about this particular situation. Pick any major event, internal or external. If you look around company forums (mailing lists, Google+, memes, etc) you will invariably see 10+ people voicing opinions that are dumb if not outright illegal.
It doesn't mean that Google is ever going to _do_ any of those things. It's the result of having 100,000 people who all think they're smart and are never told they can't speak out.
So I would not be at all surprised if a few of the 100,000 employees suggested tweaking search to do X or Y. But I can tell you without even looking that there was not a plan for doing so by anyone with the power to change anything. By the time you get to a design doc, reason tends to prevail.
My hypothetical example was random employees at the MTV campus emailing ideas to influence US SERPs to propagate their PoV on a political issue they have an interest in.
What's even more absurd is that people have the gall to defend this behavior on HN.