> 3) The users they care about are no longer people (such as technical or, per sibling comment, academic) who are trying to find specific information. They pref

> 3) The users they care about are no longer people (such as technical or, per sibling comment, academic) who are trying to find specific information. They prefer to focus on mass-market. This is the only explanation that makes sense. The vast majority of people probably enter questions and queries in natural language so a purely keyword based search is out the window. Why a list of stop words wouldn't cover that I don't know, but let's just assume it doesn't. The second point is that most people also probably hardly ever look for precise information but ask ambiguous stuff that's just hard to properly answer with traditional approaches. So my guess is that at some point they realized that most queries are of that kind, then shortly discussed keeping two search engines in parallel and finally went with "screw those stupid devs, we're freaking Google!"