Consumers also hate paying for things. I've always thought when Google came along that it was a shining beacon for being the one corporation that gives everything away for free.
I’ll give you a typical example where Google could be great but falls so short: I deliver to it on a silver platter a search query for a specific product “MRCOOL DIY 4th Gen 12k btu”. This is a very specific ductless mini split heat pump that retails for about $1750. I was looking to see if anyone had a cheaper price. Well Google Shopping mostly showed me results for either the 3rd Gen or a different BTU rating, in an apparent attempt to not show too few results. No a 36k btu unit isn’t a substitute. No, just the air handler isn’t a substitute. I have my credit card out and ready to go, buy Google is too busy showing me ads for window units!
You know where I found my answer? Eventually I gave up on Google and went to the manufacturer’s website, looked through the list of authorized dealers and saw that Costco was on the list. I then looked there directly and found the unit at $300 cheaper than elsewhere. Bad search engine, no cookie!
Ads are basically the SEO of our economy as they try to change the ranking of products in our brains.
You can look at it as GP having a vague idea of how much he wants to pay for this product and where to pay for it, but Google failed to help him find clarity. Maybe the GP could have done better by searching "cheapest" or "sellers" or something like that, but one thing I've learned about modern search engines is that providing more query details nets you less applicable results.
It's like every search engine takes all keywords with an "OR" mentality when it really should be an "AND".
And a lot of this does come down to the advertising model. I wouldn't be surprised if this benefits google because having to try 3 or 4 search queries to find what you want puts more advertisements in front of you, and increases the odds you'll click on one.
Google still has powerful boolean operators. If you use those with intentionality, and pick the hidden 'verbatim' option, you'll have a decent chance of finding what you need. However, these are all vestigial features that a minority of users employ.
The vast, vast majority of users are funneled into product choices. In a way, it helps to see that as the core function, and everything else as a secondary funnel towards that primary funnel. The search engine is designed to work so that people use it, but the end goal is for ads/SEO to be effective for the great mass of users that are particularly vulnerable to them. The GP was looking for price differences, which is something many websites base their business off of, but that's still a tiny portion of the whole and not something Google needs to optimize for compared to the misleading but lucrative results the GP had to sift through.
So they’re incentivized to be as vague as possible while still providing “useful” results.
Google Shopping results are so useless I rarely even bother trying.
I really love the thing and installing it was my first big DIY project in many ways. I did all the work myself and the results have been awesome. It can make my garage absolutely frigid (although it's not quite as good at heating, I've got some work to do around shoring up the existing insulation).
You're gonna LOVE Amazon.
/s
All of Google's offerings do indeed have a price, just not a financial one in most cases.