On the consumer side of things, their eyeball-holding core is "the platform". This includes search, news, youtube, docs, Play, etc. Search is just a component o

On the consumer side of things, their eyeball-holding core is "the platform". This includes search, news, youtube, docs, Play, etc. Search is just a component of that. It's not very different from FB: acquire eyeballs to look at ads, acquire usage data to target ads, with whatever accomplishes that goal. Search is a way for the user to, more or less, "pull" content from the platform - and everything else is a way for the platform to push content at the user. Nowhere in there is "being a good search engine" a core priority.