Best for their customers in what time frame? They might get better results in the short term, but it's much less clear what the long term effects are. What if

Best for their customers in what time frame? They might get better results in the short term, but it's much less clear what the long term effects are. What if it slows down innovation in search quality and moves effort into marketing, shiny baubles? After all, why bother spending resources on researching, implementing and evaluating the algorithms when your competitors will within a couple of months gain the most of the improvements, automatically with no effort. You complain about search relevance sucking. Why are you so eager to support a practice that has a high chance of causing it to stagnate?