This website contains age-restricted materials including nudity and explicit depictions of sexual activity.
By entering, you affirm that you are at least 18 years of age or the age of majority in the jurisdiction you are accessing the website from and you consent to viewing sexually explicit content.
Yup, and that’s why monopolies are bad. Once you get a dominant position, the way to increase profits is by abusing your market position. And publicly traded companies need to increase profits because that’s what shareholders expect.
In this case, reducing the quality of search means people need to search more often, which means they see more ads. As a double-whammy, if you improve the relevance of the ad results while reducing the relevance of the regular results, you get more click-through on the ads. So Google has little incentive, while it has a dominant position, of having a good search product. They’ll only care again if that dominance gets threatened.
There’s a recent podcast talking about this if you’re interested - https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/the-man-that-destroyed-google-search
TLDR; they fired the guy largely responsible for building google search and replaced him with the guy running google ads.
Yup, and that’s why monopolies are bad. Once you get a dominant position, the way to increase profits is by abusing your market position. And publicly traded companies need to increase profits because that’s what shareholders expect.
In this case, reducing the quality of search means people need to search more often, which means they see more ads. As a double-whammy, if you improve the relevance of the ad results while reducing the relevance of the regular results, you get more click-through on the ads. So Google has little incentive, while it has a dominant position, of having a good search product. They’ll only care again if that dominance gets threatened.