Google in Its Own Search Results
Adrianne Jeffries and Leon Yin (via Luther Lowe):
We examined more than 15,000 recent popular queries and found that Google devoted 41 percent of the first page of search results on mobile devices to its own properties and what it calls “direct answers,” which are populated with information copied from other sources, sometimes without their knowledge or consent.
When we examined the top 15 percent of the page, the equivalent of the first screen on an iPhone X, that figure jumped to 63 percent.
[…]
The choice to highlight its own products has been deliberate: Internal emails unearthed by the European Commission in an antitrust investigation show Google staffers discussing the need to place its comparison-shopping product at the top of the search results to garner traffic. An email the following year noted traffic to the retooled product had more than doubled from four million to 10 million visits, and “most of this growth is from improved google.com integration.”
Previously:
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Yandex's image search is 1000x better than Google, too. It's like the difference between an Apple II and an iPhone.
Monopolistic behavior. They are not afraid to degrade the quality of the product (the search) to earn more money, because they can.
In Russia Google has a real strong competitor Yandex, and many people use it instead of Google. So Google search results in Russia are way better, they show fewer ads, more relevant results.
Why most markets do not have real competitors to Google is not a simple question, but that's seems to be the key to how to force them to get better.