Yeah, Google has done so many things to thwart so many kindS of bad SEO (and sometimes even good SEO) that it's really hard to believe they've just innocently dropped the ball on this one. At a certain point you just have to conclude that they want the search results to look like this. "Oopsie, we just accidentally let one bad actor trample on this valuable 'real estate' for years. Silly us." Yeah right.
I think search at Google isn't getting the best and brightest anymore. It used to be the only product at the company, now it's just the oldest.
I also think there's a disconnect between how new algorithms are evaluated and real world results. Reverse image search is total trash now. Mostly returns annotations "red, dress, girl" instead of the pages where I can find the image.
Unless it's a brand name product, then it's exact matches.
So you're getting less than excellence in engineering, plus influence from shopping and ad dollar focused PMs and not much care is actually given to the search experience.
