They did that to drive up short term ad revenue and it worked, and joy was in their greedy little hearts. They also did figure out that poisoning search results drives away users, and that search is kinda the fastest gateway drug to their entire ecosystem.

But they're stuck. Fixing search would lower their ad revenue, and stock holders would kill them for that.

and the nature of their 1000s of experiments going at the same time isn't methodical at all. they don't actually know what iteration of google search was the best and most useful one. there's no going back to what worked because at no point did they ever know what worked. the modern shitty google search is the best version we will ever get to use again.

google embedded them as a core piece of information infrastructure and then demolished themselves. now our information networks fundamentally do not work anymore

Enshitification.