I don’t believe this based on my own search experience getting worse year over year. I believe they know how to improve it, but they choose to increase revenue instead.
Results seem to be less relevant to me and there are frequently more ad results than organic that display on the page.
I think they are able to do this because of lock in with users and vendors. If there was more competition, there wouldn’t be such bad results.
If it was easy to extract better results there would be competition with better results.
But I’m fairly certain that having 50-100% of the first page of search results be ads isn’t good for the internet. And it’s made worse by google search recommending chrome and chrome recommending google search.
there is some vp of the search in goodle, and he has bunch of metrics on his screen, some go down and some go up, and he obviously will chose those metrics which looks favorable to report to upper level, and then promote people who did "great" job of achieving those metrics, and fund and expand their projects.