Because they keep optimizing for ad clicks over accuracy, and at some point you hit a threshold where people just no longer feel like they're getting the data they want. At first it was one ad, and one or two clickbait content farms on page one, and people didn't mind, but these days it's 2-3 ads and 90+% content farms, and people are really wondering why they bother.

It's why gen z and alpha – who've never experienced a search engine prioritizing their needs over ad revenue – tend to go straight to youtube or other sites (and now AI), because search engines in their experience have never worked.

Google at one point actually started including their ads among the search results so you can barely tell the difference, whereas in the past the ads were in the side bar where you knew they were ads.

That tells you everything about where they are been prioritizing their energies.

Google is slowly getting out of the search engine business is my guess. That’s the only way I can make sense of it. That they’re purposefully doing a terrible job.

Self peasantization isn't very attractive

Because google, et al. gave up on fighting SEO optimization and now AI generated BS articles. They just serve up whatever their old algorithms serve up because they survive on market share and "familiarity" for the most part.