[nostrademons]

When I was in Search 15 or so years ago, there was actually a very direct cost: revenue.

The AdMixer was an "optional" response for the search page. If the ads didn't return before the search results did, the search would just not show ads, and Google wouldn't get any revenue for it. Showed the premium that Google of the day put on latency and user experience. I think we lost a few million per year to timeouts, but it was worth it for generating user loyalty, and it put a very big incentive on the ads team to keep the serving stack fast.

No idea if it's still architected like that, I kinda doubt it given recent search experiences, but I thought it was brilliant just for the sake of aligning incentives between different parts of the organization.