[Bakary]

If you already know the product you are buying down to the model, Google isn't tailored for you. It's meant for people who have a vague idea and then pick what's at the top of the search results. This is why SEO has grown to be an entire profession.

[ysavir]

I think that's a very narrow interpretation of what a search engine does. Or a narrow interpretation of what the GP was doing. Probably both.

You can look at it as GP having a vague idea of how much he wants to pay for this product and where to pay for it, but Google failed to help him find clarity. Maybe the GP could have done better by searching "cheapest" or "sellers" or something like that, but one thing I've learned about modern search engines is that providing more query details nets you less applicable results.

It's like every search engine takes all keywords with an "OR" mentality when it really should be an "AND".

And a lot of this does come down to the advertising model. I wouldn't be surprised if this benefits google because having to try 3 or 4 search queries to find what you want puts more advertisements in front of you, and increases the odds you'll click on one.

[Bakary]

Essentially I see two competing processes here.

Google still has powerful boolean operators. If you use those with intentionality, and pick the hidden 'verbatim' option, you'll have a decent chance of finding what you need. However, these are all vestigial features that a minority of users employ.

The vast, vast majority of users are funneled into product choices. In a way, it helps to see that as the core function, and everything else as a secondary funnel towards that primary funnel. The search engine is designed to work so that people use it, but the end goal is for ads/SEO to be effective for the great mass of users that are particularly vulnerable to them. The GP was looking for price differences, which is something many websites base their business off of, but that's still a tiny portion of the whole and not something Google needs to optimize for compared to the misleading but lucrative results the GP had to sift through.

[amelius]

> This is why SEO has grown to be an entire profession.

Ads are basically the SEO of our economy as they try to change the ranking of products in our brains.

[bombcar]

More importantly Google wants to sell ads to everyone not just the company with the current cheapest product.

So they’re incentivized to be as vague as possible while still providing “useful” results.

Google Shopping results are so useless I rarely even bother trying.

[IgorPartola]

I thought Google was a search engine. Why doesn’t it search as much as it misleads and distracts?

[Bakary]

Google is an ad company that produces a search engine, rather than a search engine that features ads. Although it may have been the latter in the olden days