Email from mid-2010 to mid-2015

From the state of Connecticut to a professional performance coach, Moz – the New York City-based developer of software tools – spent more than 10 years trawling email from various sources in the hopes of figuring out its source code and personality. One of the questions Moz has been asking is how it gets its search ranking data.

On Sunday morning, as search results started to point towards dozens of news stories about a litany of Moz employees, founders and former employees — many of whom are currently striking deals with the company — deleting their accounts, a familiar name from earlier in the week began to crop up repeatedly: Google.

Google appears to have been asking other sources about its ranking data for years. Back in mid-2010, a Moz staff member named David Perigory penned a Medium post titled “What I Know About Google’s Search Results”. In it, he wrote about meeting with a Google exec named Robert Meyer in 2004 who told him Google would get the data that Moz used.

“[B]y the end of the conversation, I was given a tangible amount of data that would accurately explain our search results, and he would keep most of it confidential,” Perigory wrote. “[A]s we drove away, I started to try to calculate what those data represented, and he became very nervous.”

Then, in 2015, Perigory wrote a blog post called “The Fundamental Mistake of Good Machine Learning” about getting his information from interviews with a Google employee named Jody, which resulted in an entirely different type of data.

Perigory, who is now a senior data scientist at Connexion Co. in Minneapolis, said the fact that Moz employees can now delete their accounts shows the company’s very public struggles with trust.

“As a big part of trust, entrepreneurs need to be able to depend on how they are ranked in the stock market, in real estate, in work, and so on,” he wrote. “We’ve made some big mistakes, and there’s really no way to undo them.”

As of late Monday afternoon, nearly 2,000 Moz workers had deactivated their accounts in protest.

“We’re proud of the freedom we brought to every Moz user, and we hope you continue to love and benefit from Moz services,” the company said in a statement.

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