There is an 8% drop in Google Search. What would you do?

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There is an 8% drop in Google Search. What would you do?

Asked at Google over a year ago

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Execution

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Lokesh Kumar R · Answer 1 · 2021-07-01T15:29:28+0000

Wow! 8% drop is a huge difference for Google considering the # of users use Google Search. Whenever, I try to understand why a particular event happened, I like to first of all gather few understandingabout the product, the background of the issue I'm supposed to ponder upon and then depending on the information gathered so far, I would like to move onto bucketing reasons as Internal and External one by one.

So, Google aims to collect information organize them and present it to the users in a appealing way when some one needs it. Google Search is one of their core product that a user uses to search for information irrespective of genres. There are multiple ways one searches through Google Search. They are:

Google Chrome App,
Chrome website
Google Search app
Notification from the app to some news that relates to their search/ from accounts that a user has signed in using google and has allowed for Notifications

With the above information said, I would want to have some clarity on the questions.

How long are we facing this drop? From the last month

Is it fair to assume that the drop was a gradual one? yeah, that is fair assumption

Is the drop pertains to a particular location, type of device, User age or any other related demographics? No, the drop was across platforms, locations. However,when checking across age, it was specifically shown by people between age 18-30 years.

Internal bucket has factors that will cause sudden changes while External bucket has factors that will cause gradual changes. Since, we got to know that the change was pretty gradual, I would want to dive deep into the External Bucket.

External Bucket:

So the very first thing that I want to know is how our PR image doing. Is there anything that we released recently that got a big attention? Yeah, recently we recently disclosed our data harvesting policy.

oh okay. Was there any negative impact that it created at the moment of launch? Nothing much. Like any other press release, There were both positive and negative comments here and there. Nothing significant at that time.

So, our PR seems good but before finalising anything wrt PR, I would want to go to other probable things.

So, next I would like to check if there was any important major release by competition that is attracting our users to move from us to them? How do you expect us to check this. We don't have any direct data that talks about this.

One way of learning about this is Twitter, as there people often share their thoughts on different firms using hashtags. If there are any ajor hashtag trending related to any release from our competition? Okay. On checking we did not find any players launching something groundbreaking that has attracted the crowd.

Next, I would like to think about change in user behaviour that could have caused us something like this. User behaviours are things that are gonna change no matter what. So probably users are exxpecting something that we are not providing or somehting that competition provides better than us that users got attracted.

Since the drop is espescially from people between 18-30, I would like to understand them before trying to analyse something.

These group of people are tech-savvy in general and belong to a group that easily change to a different sofware and adapt to it easily. Privacy is one important thing that is getting more and more priority among users like them.

With the above understanding, Next I would like to understand how good are we doing in related metrics to searching in google like app opening etc.. specific to these users? So we are facing a drop in app opening rate as well among these user segments.

so this could mean that these users are preferring someother search engine app instead of ours that even the opening metrics has got disturbed.

To check about this, First I would like to go back to our PR image espescially at places like LinkedIn and Twitter. These are places where people have discussion around different firms and their policies. So I would like to look into trending hashtags in these platforms related to google and check if there are any direct comparisons made with other competition? Cool. You've cracked the issue. On searching on similar ground we found that these tech-savvy people found that our data harvesting policies to be more privscy threatening and have shifted to competition platform called brave.

Alice · Answer 2 · 2023-12-15T22:08:05+0000

First, I will look into the data to see if I can isolate the problem and find out where this is happening, and how related metrics are doing.

Next, I will form some hypotheses about what is causing this based on the data, and validate the hypotheses.

Once the root cause is found, then I can propose a fix for the drop.

Can you describe the drop of 8% - when did this begin? and what exactly is the metric that's dropped 8%? Is it daily number of search queries? compared against the day before? Or W/W search?

Supposed this is a sudden drop, and this exceeds normal fluctuation, and there is no seasonality factors from past patterns.

Supposed I can quickly validate with engineering that there is no known outages, no changes in metric measurements, no missing logs, or other data problems.

I will segment the data by different ways - is this isolated to certain platforms, devices, browser types? is this by country, languages? is this on APIs, versions?

I will then look at associated metrics - is there a reduction in page visits? page loading? a change in default search engine deals? did we exit any country, market? Is there any competitor launch? Is there any major event or disaster happening in the world? Does it coincide with the data we looked at?

I will then look at any product releases that coincides with the drop to see if anything could impact the search box or API calls.

If this is an internal release issue, we would examine is there can be a fix.