Why would Google give themselves less money?

It should be illegal to mislead the users like this. The search terms weren't generic and didn't match anything.

Let me repeat myself

  >>>> When making more money requires degrading the product you know we've fucked up

That just sounds like business to me. You do whatever makes money.

This is called enshittification. Business behaves like with with the lack of regulations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41277484

Maybe it is today, but that's not how it's always been. The idea is that competition means the best product wins. But there's a lot it ways to degrade competition, not just monopolization. We're living in a lemon economy

There's never been any rule that the best product wins. Trivial example if I make RAM chips and give them away for free I'll lose.

There's a lot of reasons, but it's probably how Google makes most of their money - brand names end up being high value ad targets - at least 6+ years ago when I worked in that sphere of things (ecommerce, primarily). It's legit extortion.

I guess that's why - because extortion is immoral. Eventually, those paying the protection fees will eventually find someone better to pay or will stop paying when the protection doesn't show up.