Google's main game is not serving better and better results: It's generating more clicks for advertisers on the first couple of results. The antithesis to Google's business model is someone asking an AI a question and receiving a bunch of direct answers for a monthly fee. Google's business model is people trying a bunch of queries (essentially shopping around), clicking on a whole set of links (each time costing the advertiser money without leading to a sale) until they get what they were looking for. It's the modern equivalent of confusing supermarket layouts with all the essential products stowed away in the back.
(So, disclosure that I work at Google, but nowhere near anything to do with search or ads.)
That is wildly distorting the way online advertisement works, mostly by a sideways denial that "advertising works" at all. The business model is that people who sell "X" want a link to their product displayed when potential customers consume content related to "X". There's nothing unclear or weird about this, and it's not fundamentally any different form print ads in the 1930's.
So to the extent that "Google's main game is not serving better results", that's true, in the same way that Apple's game is not selling a better mobile operating system. iOS and search both generate revenue by making the product they're actually selling more effective.
Totally agree with you about online ads, I worked in that space for years and that's not the goal with Ads. Years ago it became clear that Google was shifting towards taking over the lower level advertiser markets and providing services and automated systems to use Ads without requiring a marketing agency while providing higher levels of data analysis and tools for agencies to tap that market. Has nothing to do with stealing from advertisers, and a lot of Google's internal programs will likely drive more money to these smaller players.
> iOS and search both generate revenue by making the product they're actually selling more effective
In the abstract, sure.
The problem starts with separating financial incentives internally from product improvement and aligning it with short term revenue increases. Then you start separating the financial side from all other aspects of the business entirely, a la Jack Welch. That's where a lot of major US corporations are right now. When that happens, you end up with a conflict between what is best for the company and what is best for the people running the company, and you end up with product quality decreasing.
Right now from an outside perspective it looks like there was an internal conflict in the Search team at Google and the more product oriented leaders were pushed out in favor of the finance guys over the last year or two, with a side effect being lower search quality.
Except that the inscentives are totally different from an end user perspective. Apple is inscentivised to make the phone more attractive to the person using it, because they're the ones paying. With Google search, it's the advertiser that's paying. The only thing Google needs to worry about is keeping advertisers happy. That doesn't align with making search results better.
That's specious. Apple doesn't get paid by "consumers" either, they sell phones to retailers for the most part. "All they care about" is making retailers happy, right?
Obviously everyone who sells a product want to keep their end users (the "end" in "end users" is there for a reason!) happy, because if they don't they won't get paid. To argue that only your favorite is so incentivised seems silly.
