Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

I'd point out that Page and Brin predicted the course of their own search engine, and perhaps their own company, in 1998:

“The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.”

“We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”

“Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.”

"Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who “deserves” to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed.”

“We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.”

“Search engines have migrated from the academic domain to the commercial. Up until now most search engine development has gone on at companies with little publication of technical details. This causes search engine technology to remain largely a black art and to be advertising oriented. With Google, we have a strong goal to push more development and understanding into the academic realm.”

> http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

This is an interesting point, but I don't see how it relates to Google doing away with 20% time.

Just watching as an interested outsider for all these years and partly based on the paper quoted above, much of Google's early energy and innovation was based on the simple idea of extending and applying knowledge of the new field in service to users.

When that focus shifted to exactly what Page and Brin had criticized themselves in 1998, we can clearly see that it's not the interests of the users being served anymore.

The decline of 20% time appears to go hand in hand with this shift from the focus on the user to focus on the advertiser and other interests first. I'm not claiming direct correlation but it's not a stretch to say there might be some connection.