The Man Who Killed Google Search

I don't use Google for search directly, but many that do have commented on the general quality of the search results. In this article Zitron connects the dots via emails that were made public in discovery to actions made to drive revenue up by changes in the search responses.

I can tell you first-hand the mechanics here work. If you are running a large website using ads it is very simple to identify ways to increase impressions by changing the user experience. The tradeoff (usually) is that those changes are typically negative for the user. In news organizations this is part of why there is a "firewall" between the team making the content and the team selling ads. For Google, that is the search results page and the algorithms that decide what goes where.

So the mechanism is for sure there. Are the actions there? Read and see what you think.

There is also a response to comments Google made about the assertions. If your curious what I do use for search I pay for Kagi and my fallback is the free DuckDuckGo.