>1. To protect ad revenue they make search results worse to increase the number of searches by making people refine their searches. This made people upset because search result quality went down.

Why would this work? Were yahoo and askjeeves sandbagging their results too just so they can get more clicks?

I don't know how much control Goog has over Youtube despite owning them but I do note in passing they removed dislikes, removed upload dates (apparently?), removed 5 stars. Easier to trick people into ads

The platform has been various kinds of hostile for a few years now