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It's perfectly normal to react and criticize failures of an almost monopolistic search engine, when the good content is outranked by inferior content.

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Who decides what is good and what is inferior?

Google, of course. And they're trying to please both their consumers and customers, but more focused on consumers, because there's always another customer.

Someone will always lose in a competition for limited top spots. The Internet continues to rapidly expand every single day but there are still just 10(ish) spots on the front page.

I got what you meant but I think you have the words flipped. Google's customers are advertisers and the consumers of their products are users like you and me.

I assert that a long-term profit optimization will short-term appear to be a focus on consumers (users), and that Google, Facebook, etc. are aware of this. Unless they think their business model is dying and they should just milk the cow as fast as possible before it falls over, which I really doubt.

Did you read the article?

Yes, what does the article have to do with my question to the GP?

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