This would seem to explain, at least in part, the marked decline in search result quality, particularly for niche, low-result queries.
this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2023
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This was why I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo as my go-to search engine a few years ago. My searches tend to be for falling down Internet rabbit holes in search of information on something of interest, not shopping. With Google, it had gotten to the point where searches gave me nothing but web site after web site with the same text copy/pasted, and a lot of Pintrest links. DuckDuckGo gives me a wider variety of web sites when I do a search, without needing to go through hundreds of links to the same text copy/pasted as the result.
To summarize, when you search "sneakers" on Google they sneakily replace your search term with Nike. They get paid by Nike by getting a cut of the ad revenue and then can also sell more product increasing their cut.
This hurts everyone except Google. Advertisers pay more for the click, consumers pay more, Google wins