well, i think also Google has a motivation to make the search results as bad as they can get away with.
a crappy page with nothing but ads is going to get clicks, and since Google is the #1 ad network, it means more money for Google.
if Google organic search results were perfect, people would never click on the ads. the worse the results are, the more likely the ads are better and you get trained to click... and ker-ching!
Google needs to be good enough to (i) discourage mass defection to Bing and Duck-Duck-Go, (ii) not produce public outrage as happened when A list bloggers were getting outranked by duplicate content, and (iii) not get in trouble for anti-trust. (Hint: if you want to run a spam farm, buy a second or third tier search engine.
a crappy page with nothing but ads is going to get clicks, and since Google is the #1 ad network, it means more money for Google.
if Google organic search results were perfect, people would never click on the ads. the worse the results are, the more likely the ads are better and you get trained to click... and ker-ching!
Google needs to be good enough to (i) discourage mass defection to Bing and Duck-Duck-Go, (ii) not produce public outrage as happened when A list bloggers were getting outranked by duplicate content, and (iii) not get in trouble for anti-trust. (Hint: if you want to run a spam farm, buy a second or third tier search engine.