Everyone is like: haha that is funny, or evil, but think about it for a second
Consider large financial groups. Often they have both investment banking and wealth management divisions. Let's say IB is a primary dealmaker for country's oil industry. Why would WM division hire an analyst covering oil industry, combing through the public sources? They already have insider knowledge of the industry!
Oh wait...
Except that it is expressly illegal and finance is required by law to maintain "glass wall" between certain divisions and control the flow of information.
It is quite believable that Google would want to avoid accusations of unfair competition, self-regulate, and hire an SEO person for one of their non-search related businesses, like Nest or broadband, or carpool service, and maintain some degree of plausible deniability that it does not use insider information to compete with other non-search-related companies.
Wow, I would not have come at it that way but it makes a lot of sense. I was guessing it was someone who would work the anti-spam team to identify "bad" SEO while promoting "good" SEO but I like your idea better.
Consider large financial groups. Often they have both investment banking and wealth management divisions. Let's say IB is a primary dealmaker for country's oil industry. Why would WM division hire an analyst covering oil industry, combing through the public sources? They already have insider knowledge of the industry!
Oh wait...
Except that it is expressly illegal and finance is required by law to maintain "glass wall" between certain divisions and control the flow of information.
It is quite believable that Google would want to avoid accusations of unfair competition, self-regulate, and hire an SEO person for one of their non-search related businesses, like Nest or broadband, or carpool service, and maintain some degree of plausible deniability that it does not use insider information to compete with other non-search-related companies.