What KPIs in specific?

A primary KPI is revenue.

Revenue comes from ads.

So making paid ad results more relevant for the click, than ensuring high quality organic search.

Maybe, the more valuable the paid ads, the worse the organic rankings.

my guess is they did something to cut costs by making each search less ressource intensive. I would pay to have google search behave as it used to. nowadays it seems to ignore most of what I try to tell it to look for, and instead shows what it "thinks" most other people probably mean.

> Google knowingly made their search results shittier and shittier for years

unfortunately this extends to youtube too. now they have a new shitty trick. you click on the link and they randomly give you a completely different video.