It isn't the managers it is the business. All those geniuses hired and over years and years no one came up with another business model but ads. I pay for ad-free YouTube and would happily pay for ad free search. As would many. Many people would like a google scale micropayments system that isn't ads. The failure to do this led directly to social media becoming customer devouring experiences rather than making good products people want.

> If I search for a hotel the top N results are for other hotels, and then results for travel agents, and buried somewhere in this sea of uselessness is the result I searched for.

The other day I had a DMV appointment scheduled on my Google Calendar with the office address saved in the location field. I opened the event and clicked on the address to navigate there.

I didn't realize initially but the first few Google Maps results were ads! When clicking on an exact address link!! I almost ended up at some apartment complex 2 miles away. Absolutely bewildering.

Never thought I would go to DuckDuckGo for searching, ever. I'd do Kagi but I don't like their use of Yandex so I'll keep an eye on whether they figure their stuff out politically. I'd pay for search but not if it's paying Russia, I've been very unhappy with what Russia does with money in recent decades.

> The managers at Google have become self interested promotion hunters, and the programmers weak sycophants. It wasn't like this in the early days when I was there, the best ideas won, but then the B player managers were hired and the rot started.

I bet they run some metrics, and while hyper-intelligent persons like you are annoyed, there is a chance that avg joes representing 95% of revenue are fine with that.