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Yeah I mean there are probably a thousand people working explicitly and directly on web search alone, not to mention all the auxiliary work that goes into supporting websearch. This assumption is very incorrect.

I think we should explain this more clearly to the original author; it’s probably true that maybe 5% work on ads but that is literally the ads system like Adwords and Adsense. The only reason those are valuable is that Google has tons of traffic and that traffic is driven by the work of the other 95% working on sub-verticals, core search, Youtube, etc.

If you take away the people working on those these services would stagnate and people will start going to another search engine and then you lose revenue.

Yeah it’s a hilariously incorrect article. Even if it were 5% engineers, the article presents it as if all the non-engineers are excess weight that don’t do anything useful.