[shockeychap]

Wholeheartedly agree, but with an important caveat - Google is no longer fighting for the best interest of it's users, it's fighting for the best interests of it's advertisers. How useful the results are is now secondary to "how much can this search be monetized". The former was important in the early days when Google needed to be competitive on search.

[PaulHoule]

Most directly, if the search results were perfect you would never need to click on an ad.

The most evil thing Google is doing now is pushing brands to buy ads on their own name so that they appear above the organic #1 search result. It's like the time Facebook decided it wouldn't send messages to followers who like you unless you paid up.

[magicalist]

> The most evil thing Google is doing now is pushing brands to buy ads on their own name

It's not like this is a new thing. The court cases about it are almost 20 years old: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v._Louis_Vuitton