Why would Amazon want you to have it, though? They benefit fantastically from manipulating search results against you.
Amazon makes money by selling products you want and loses money when you return them.
They aren’t manipulating search results “against you”
It wouldn’t be net positive at all to hide products you want in order to get a fraction of a penny from ad impressions.
This is the type of conspiracy theory that immediately falls apart if you think about the numbers at all.
however being a "platform" (i.e. middle-man) between retailers and customers is highly profitable
guess which one Amazon is mostly now?
Been using Newegg/BestBuy for electronics, Costco/Target/Walmart for home goods, local grocery stores for food, and Barnes and Noble for books. I used to be good at picking out the gems from the cruft on Amazon, but either it's gotten more difficult or I've lost my edge.
Also kinda nice having to wait again until I have a sizeable order to get free shipping. Much less junk.
How does changing stores help. If the products are still the same but on Walmart, how are you getting better information?
It'd take a lot for it to get that bad. Towards the end, Fry's was filling entire aisles with random cheap junk unrelated to electronics like hand sanitizer, light bulbs, pepper spray, etc - and even with that, they were still having to wall off large sections of the store that they couldn't fill.