No, it’s pretty simple. The search ordering algorithm should get as inputs only your query, and the linked page.
Currently, Google manually special-cases a handful of pages. That should simply end.
> And this is even weirder. Who actually wants this?
As I explained in another comment, I live in a city where Here Maps is vastly superior to Google Maps (Google Maps has maps material from ~2009, and, until 2 weeks ago, their satellite imagery was from 2004, so they frequently route you to non-existing roads, or so on, and they have no transit integration and bad traffic data, while Here Maps has data for roads and satellite from this week, and has transit integration), yet everyone uses Google Maps, simply because it is already preinstalled and shows up first in Google Search, despite worse results.
So, for at least a city of 280k people, Here Maps should probably show first. Or at least be equally integrated as Google Maps is.
Because currently the worse product is winning just because it is bundled.
This is such an odd argument. It assumes that search is a largely solved problem.
But search is not solved, and the web (and human knowledge) is an evolving corpus.
> A user can then scroll through the search results, and below the amazon result is a horizontally scrolling list of results from Amazon, the Google Maps and the Here Maps results both have miniature maps, etc.
And this is even weirder. Who actually wants this?