There’s so much low effort, low hanging fruit that Google could do to improve results, that I just assume they've realized those things are unprofitable for them.

I mean just de-ranking any article with an affiliate link alone would skyrocket the relevance of what content you surface on search.

The problem for Google is, they’re incentivized to make the results worse than the SERP ads. If the organic results are too good, nobody would ever click the ads. And they basically gutted the 3rd party Adsense ecosystem, so they no longer monetize off third party sites. That to me, was the dumbest decision in company history — basically leading to the dilemma they’re in now. They squeezed all the profit in the short term while killing the open web in the long term.

You can’t have a product that purports to help people search the open web…while simultaneously trying to sabotage people from organically clicking on the open web. It’s pure idiocy.

The answer is staring them right in the face with Youtube, who faces zero threat to their dominance. Turns out if you just surface the best stuff and rev-share the ad money with the content creators (like they used to do with blogs via Adsense) then 1) the creators keep producing good stuff 2) the product stays useful and 3) importantly the monopoly profits continue minting!