>do you have direct evidence that Google actively made search worse?

sure. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

>These emails — which I encourage you to look up — tell a dramatic story about how Google’s finance and advertising teams, led by Raghavan with the blessing of CEO Sundar Pichai, actively worked to make Google worse to make the company more money. This is what I mean when I talk about the Rot Economy — the illogical, product-destroying mindset that turns the products you love into torturous, frustrating quasi-tools that require you to fight the company’s intentions to get the service you want.

Of course, it's hard to "objectively" prove that they literally made search worse, but it's clear they were fine with stagnating in order to maximize ad revenue.

I see it as the same way Tinder works if you want the mentality. There's a point where being "optimal" hurts your bottom line, so you don't desire achieving a perfect algorithm. Meanwhile, it can be so bad for Google that directly searching for a blog title at times can leave me unsuccessful.

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eloisant 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> I see it as the same way Tinder works if you want the mentality. There's a point where being "optimal" hurts your bottom line, so you don't desire achieving a perfect algorithm

Yes, in the case of Google:

- They make more money from ads if the organic results are not as good (especially if it's not clear they're add)

- They get more impressions if you don't find the answer at the first search and have to try a different query

	▲	SoftTalker 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This is entirely because "we" insist on search being free. This means Google needs to find other ways to pay for it, which creates a different set of incentives. If we somehow paid directly for search, then Google's incentives would be to make search good so that we'd be happy customers and come back again, rather than find devious ways to show us more ads. Most people put up with the current search experience because they'd rather have "free" than "good" and we see this attitude in all sorts of other markets as well, where we pay for cheap products that fail over and over rather than paying once (but more) for something good, or we trade our personal information and privacy for a discount.