[ugh]

Google is a large company. I’m pretty sure that they have a lot of people working on search quality.

This seems like a popular fallacy (Does it have a name?), probably a result of anthropomorphising companies. It’s hard for a human to solve more than one problem at once and if they do they have naturally less time for each problem.

Sure, there can be similar effects in companies but it’s certainly not inevitable, not as inevitable as with humans, anyway. We just don‘t know whether improvements in search quality suffered because of this new feature. It doesn’t strike me as something search quality people would typically work on, though.

[treeface]

It's called a false dichotomy or a false dilemma:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma