I’m skeptical that making users spend a long time trying to find the right monitor would actually be good for Amazon’s revenue or that Amazon would intentionally optimize for it. If the typical user really experienced that struggle, many would probably give up without making a purchase.

To hazard a guess, I’d speculate that apparent poor quality of search results is more likely Amazon trying to push customers toward items where Amazon earns more margin. The average customer probably just buys the first/cheapest result and isn’t going to spend hours scouring the product pages. There’s a lot of complexity in Amazon’s relationships with suppliers, fee structure, and warehouses/logistics that could affect the revenue-optimizing search ranking but isn’t obvious to the user.