Why are Google's search products bad if Google has decades of Know-how?

Because these days, Google search is just as much as about hiding some information as it is for finding other information. It's a product to maximize revenue and utility for its owners. It's hardly about maximizing utility for the end user.

I think there's more nuance than the cynical answer of making money.

Internally Google has become a "rest and vest" culture. Smart people ship one or two meaningful things per year, and because Google is swimming in cash they don't understand that they are ridiculously slow and inefficient.

Why isn’t a slaughterhouse comfortable for cows?

Google serves for ad buyers, they are the clients. Users are just a cattle being sold.

And it has been like this from the moment google started being a business.

Google has an agenda but also SEO is an big industry that is at war with Google. Between Google's ideological bent and the war with SEO, it's not simply about indexing and ranking anymore.

Search quality has decreased drastically within the last year... My theory is that they ran some A/B tests and concluded that:

bad search results = more clicks on ads

The absolute worst search results I've ever gotten are trying to search my history in Chrome.

From what I can see and feel interacting with Google teams as a customer on the business side, (ie not as a consumer), it appears Product creation seems to be rewarded very well organizationally but Maintenance and continuous improvement, not so much.

Also it seems culturally very hard to be able to actually talk to their product engineers about their product - and it's not because of the sales teams are coming in the middle but because the sales teams themselves seem to struggle to get time from the product engineering teams. I've had multiple instances of sales teams suggesting that the best way forward was to talk with the product engineers, then struggling to setup time with them.

Google search isn't optimized for usefulness - it's optimized for revenue.

Define"bad" in my experience alternatives like ddg work until you want something obscure then Google shines

Making good products takes hard work and focus on users. Few people do this automatically. Most people only do it with sufficient incentive.

I worked at Google 2013-2018. The single root cause for Google and other tech companies letting quality degrade or failing to make good products is mis-aligned incentives. The company's leaders do not incentivize workers to prioritize user experience. The good news is that execution failures create opportunities for new companies to build innovative products.

Because they switched to AI. That's why verbatim search, among other things, stopped working.

"Good" is very subjective. Google has investors, customers and users to keep happy. It's most likely not possible to please all parties maximally. It's only natural that they optimize for profits, investors, and customers. The non-paying customers fall further down the priority list every year.

For the same reasons why Boeings max8 was unsafe after decades of know-how — Shareholder value.

A couple of years ago they added AI to search. It probably worked at the time, but in five years the amount of new content is really big and that's probably why things went wrong.

They must have optimized it for making more money rather than showing proper results

Because the products are optimized for making money.

Almost every comment here are saying different things, so probably a tldr of the comment section is: I don't like Google, so I'm just gonna wrap my anti-values around the products they offer and post it here as a comment.

In other words, no one really knows. If you don't like Google, I recommend just using something else.

Censorship and SEO.