If search works too good you are gone too quickly. Amazon figured this out A LOOOONG time ago. If Google makes you rephrase your search 10 times that 10x ads they can show you. If they take those opportunities to also drive you to crap sites that waste time but are heavily monetized by Google ads then that's even more for them. It's no different than grocery stores putting the most commonly purchased items all the way in the back. Want to run in and get milk? Maybe, we have 6 gallons that expire in the next 5 minutes up front, but if you want more you gotta walk past chips, beer, frozen pizzas and a wall of cheese.

It's definitely an accelerating trend though, online search is getting so much worse and even fast food menus are insane now. You need to the app to see anything other than the most profitable combos in many cases.

> even fast food menus are insane now

They were really good when the kiosks were new, just like Google was.

I guess PMs hunting local revenue growth but macro loss by spamming upsell and making what you want hard to find is a common problem with these luser uncentric systems.

You nailed it. Couldn't phrase it any better.

It used to be that I could find 5 to 10-year-old articles quickly on Google. Now it’s much harder.

I’ve started keeping a log of every interesting article I find since I know I won’t be able to find it earlier.

I’m also seeing a trend where they try and answer question and will pull from any source. The answer often being wildly wrong.

Saw one of “people also ask” where the source was some dudes fanfiction so the suggested question and answer were complete non sense.

Run them through archive.ph for good measure when you see them too

I've found this too. And not only Google but also Bing/DDG. It's really annoying when trying to reference a past event in discussions