For the same reason it became more popular than other search engines in 00s. Those would give honest search results, Google would have various kinds of complex foolery approaching ML to give people what they wanted quicker.

One can say their corporate culture shows signs of overfitting for that situation. And not just theirs. In general those attempts to make products more competitive with even more complex foolery outside of the main functionality - are that.

Except when products are simply less usable for said main functionality, people use them less even if they don’t consciously realize that.

Also - what is Google in essence? It’s saying that some computing thing is too smart for you to run it at home or self-host it. It can only be done by the very smart and important people in companies with trillions in capitalization. And because you can’t, you are by some cultural taboo forbidden, to run it at home or self-host it, they get to manipulate results to make you give money to the people partnering with them.

We all know there’s nothing fundamentally or practically impossible in making a search engine. If we don’t have to cache pages, it’s actually easy.

The issue is in the service requirements. What the Internet needs is a technically transparent p2p market of services. Where storage and computing power can be transparently donated (or sold) just like in some countries you can sell power to the electric grid.

OK, I’ve described the magic wand. That’s the strategy. Tactics is for someone actually capable of conceiving the thing. LOL