Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations. Here’s how it works. Say you search for “children’s clothing.” Google converts it, without your knowledge, to a search for “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear,” making a behind-the-scenes substitution of your actual query with a different query that just happens to generate more money for the company, and will generate results you weren’t searching for at all. It’s not possible for you to opt out of the substitution. If you don’t get the results you want, and you try to refine your query, you are wasting your time. This is a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape.
If accurate, this is a perfect example of the principle of ‘enshitification’ in action. That is, a good service or product becoming increasingly terrible as its development is continuously perverted by revenue related incentives.
Indeed, it has the hallmark feature of enshittification: screwing over one party (the users) to benefit another (the advertisers), followed by screwing over the second party as well. I’m sure no advertiser wants to waste their ad budget showing ads to people who haven’t indicated any interest in their product; if they wanted to spend their money that way, they’d have bought ads on the more generic search terms instead.