What strategic reason could Google have for making their search worse?
1. The simple explanation would be Google demonstrating how essential it is, and/or what the internet would look like regulated. You want to regulate us such that XYZ, how about we go ahead and show you in advance what regulating XYZ looks like. It doesn't look good, does it?
2. Similarly, it could Google fixing (talk about the wrong word choice!) all the problems that need to be fixed/regulated in advance as strategy to forestall worse regulation. You don't know what worse luck your bad luck saved you from (Cormac McCarthy). They did this with FLoC. Targeting getting too targeted? Just group target and anonymize. Abracadabra! Boo-boo-all-better. No need pay expensive lobbyist to lobby against the privacy rights we don't actually seem to have. Maybe forestalling privacy is the aim, but let's not walk the plank into the Sea of Conspiracy.
3. They've abdicated on search. They've put it on some sort of shit-filled, NLP AuI (Artificially UnIntelligent) Total Perspective Vortex for reasons that have not yet been revealed, other than torture, obviously. They've redirected all search talent to some new, amazing search project, putting old search on some sort of AI autopilot.
4. GPT-3 has won. If your search engine is built on quality, and GPT-3 passes Turing on content, comments, and general heuristics, your entire search engine flops, SEO-optimized bots win re:signal/noise flood, but this should appear in the financials, if not now then soon.
5. The world is too “hot”. We need people to just fucking stop doing shit. How do? Frustrate them. And there's no way like confusing the what-why-when-how-where-how-much to frustrate the fluck out of anybody. If you can't find what you're looking for, then you can't do what you want to do. Peace through ambiguity and frustration. Aggravate everyone into just giving up and Minecrafting the day away. Besides, it's too cold to jihad. Pax Googlus. That's a bit of a dark horse, social engineering on a global scale, and therefore impossible to get approved by Lawyer A through Lawyer ZZZ, and therefore, by today's standards, almost certainly probable.
6. The crown jewels escaped the safe. The search algorithm itself was compromised by corporate espionage, sabotage, cyberattack, mole, double-agent, stupidity, cunning, whatever. Must replace all search immediately and irrevocably because as soon as this news outs, customers will want to know how long old search was compromised and to what end? Result: massive lawsuit.
Facebook is very similar to that: They don't intentionally (at least not directly) enrage people and drive up disinformation, but it is a side effect of Facebook agressively manipulating the timelines, advertisements and comments their users get to see. But ultimately they do willingly cause it (and later people working at Facebook can tell themselves that they are hard at work to fight it, and that it is a difficult problem to solve).