[irfn]

The question to about the obvious quality drop for Google is, Is this intentional? Perhaps some cost saving or ROI measures? Or the motive always was to just train their AI and we just helped with that?

[tempest_]

Just perverse incentives.

Google isn't incentivized to be a good search engine.

They are incentivized to be just good enough that you don't go elsewhere while increasing the number of ads / paid results.