My assumption here is that this decision is one where someone had an A/B test that showed people are more likely to click on an ad when the content is structured the way it’s shown.
Which comes at the cost of a good user experience, where the feature PM didn’t truly ask: “does this deliver any value to the people using the search?”
Always trying to remember the wonderful excerpt[0] from Ken Kocienda’s “Creative Selection” on A/B tests - just because the data shows the outcomes are more significant does not make that a better experience.
A consequence of having a monopoly is not needing to deliver as much value. I see comments advocating using a different search engine, but the small number of users that move do a different search engine because of this won't offset the increase in revenue Google will see. They pay Apple and Mozilla a substantial amount of money to be the default search engine and most users won't bother to change it.
If they get bad enough, people will make the effort to change the default search engine. Seems Google has been trying to do this slowly (aka boiling a frog), but similarly to a market bubble, at some point it'll pop and they'll take exponential losses to their market share.
Which comes at the cost of a good user experience, where the feature PM didn’t truly ask: “does this deliver any value to the people using the search?”
Always trying to remember the wonderful excerpt[0] from Ken Kocienda’s “Creative Selection” on A/B tests - just because the data shows the outcomes are more significant does not make that a better experience.
[0]: https://mobile.twitter.com/kocienda/status/11134509457051770...