[napo]

Amazon search looks bad for us because it is designed to sell ads. Its goal is to make company pay the most money to show articles. Iirc, when this was proposed, Jeff Bazos said that this was the most stupid idea he ever heard. I think the reason why it was introduced, and why Executives don't want to change it, is that it generates a ton of money for Amazon. I'd personally love if in the end this would be the reason that Amazon stop making money and it would have been some short sighted greedy move. I'm afraid that advertisement, when it comes down to numbers, is just damn too profitable.

[FiveOhThree]

Unfortunately the store's primary revenue source seems to be from advertisers bidding on sponsored search result slots instead of the actual product sales.

[BobaFloutist]

Which can't possibly be actually true, since advertiser bids must necessarily be funded by actual product sales - I guess there's an edge case where an independently successful business intentionally overspends on Amazon ads to quash potential competitor discovery, relying on non-Amazon sales to make up for the deficit, but I can't imagine that's a particularly common result.

If people give up on buying things from Amazon because there's just no way to find reliably usable products, Amazon will eventually lose out on that advertising revenue. So either we're mid way through that process, or there's something more complicated going on.