Even worse, sometimes instead of striking them out, it substitutes them with "synonyms" that are anything but. For example, if you search for FreeBSD, you sometimes get results where "linux" is highlighted as a keyword. I'm pretty sure that this is some ML crap doing this, because the more obscure the term, the more likely it is to get it not just wrong, but hilariously wrong, even to the point of meaning the opposite.
Maybe they changed that stance at some point?
It sounds like what you're saying is that it acts more like a typical full-text index now? I suppose it's better than nothing, but still not what I would like to see happen.
I don't believe that it's the masses looking for e-commerce sites. I think it's that Google wants people to click on e-commerce sites because it makes money off of those ads. And even if someone doesn't click on a sponsored link to an e-commerce site, that click still reinforces in their mind that Google is the place to start shopping.
There was a comment on HN yesterday where someone wrote something like, "Did you know there are countries where people who want to buy things just go to amazon.com directly and don't search for their item in Google?" I was floored. It never occurred to me that if I want to buy something at amazon.com that I would involve Google in any way. But there must be legions of people who do this, or that person wouldn't have made that statement.
At the same time, I think that Google falls down at this kind of lead generation because it allows so much automation that it can't be trusted.
I just put "rocket to mars" in Google and the top results are ads for Wal-Mart and Michael's.
To be fair, the duck isn't much better. I just put "f-14 fighter jet" into Duck and got an ad for "Fighter Jets For Sale near you" with a link to an auto repair shop.
Oh, I tried an alternate approach and it didn't work... Search bing for Google and you just get a second bing. https://imgur.com/a/YntBiYc
I don’t even notice that it’s not Google anymore.
Not necessarily. The great unwashed masses may not be searching for ecommerce, but people not searching for ecommerce may not be monetizable.
Let's say we run a basketball web site that has a search engine. People sometimes type the word "travel" into the search bar.
We can show them results related to the rules violation of "travelling," and/or results related to physical travel such as "trusted partners" who provide charter trips to playoff games.
It could be that we know that 90% of the searches for the word "travel" are for the rules violation. But the remaining 10% are the ones that click on ads. And we get a kickback when someone clicks on an ad on our site.
If all we care about is the web site's revenue, we might choose to prioritize showing travel to basketball games, even though we know it's only relevant for 10% of the users who query the word "travel."
It may only be 10% of our users, but it's 100% of our revenue from keyword searches for "travel." So we show the monetizable results, and maybe--if we are feeling generous--we'll show a little line, "Showing results for travel to games. Click here to search for travel (violation)."
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TL;DR: We don't need to assume that Google is trying to provide good search results for everyone. They might be trying to provide the results that maximize their immediate revenue.