What people don't like to admit is that Google, YouTube, Reddit and Facebook all prioritize market share above some odd gatekeeping ideal that people have decided an idealized internet should be. They've turned it into a MacDonald's instead of a Tavern on the Green, because that's what most people find accessable even though it's worse in almost every way. But, Tavern on the Green could not serve the same number of people or make the same amount of money as MacDonald's. You can't always scale up a BBS to serve 2.5 billion people and expect it to have the same charm and not expect companies to charge for services to getting results. Dial up services and bulletin boards had their charms, but this internet is way better =)
Personally I just think google is losing to seo because google is playing it too neutral and not opinionated enough. Like facebook, they want decisions to look like math chose the answer, and not people, because they want to deflect accusations of bias. Google would be better if it were more opinionated. I go there because I WANT them to rank results and tell me what they think are the best quality answers.
Google may also be lost in an A/B testing catch 22 feedback loop, where what gets clicked gets elevated, and whats elevated gets clicked. The less straightforward, more clickbait cryptic results get clicked to see what they are.
The result that spells out all the answers might not get
a click at all. Ive noticed in the last year or two wikipedia not even being on the first page of searches it should be the top two or three results for.
They can put in optimization and skew the results with opinion, but not doing that might have more to do with lawyers than desire. There is a keen eye on their search results as far as political and business results are concerned.
