How does that happen? Well, companies can pay Amazon for specific search terms. If you are a company selling PC monitors, and you know that a lot of websites recommend a competitor's product, you can pay Amazon to redirect searches for that product towards your product. Amazon doesn't care whether the search term you paid them for actually describes your product, they only care how much money you give them. Theoretically Pepsi could pay Amazon so much money, that if somebody searches for Coca Cola, he would be shown Pepsi instead.

Paying companies like Amazon or Google for search terms makes them a lot of money, but of course destroys the quality of the search results even more than traditional search engine optimization does. People add "Reddit" to their Google searches, because without that, they'll only see paid-for results which don't actually correspond to what they were searching for.

The interesting question now is whether AI will make the situation even worse, or whether it will improve internet searches. The general trend of enshittification and need to recoup billions of investment in AI suggests that things could get even worse. But anybody who has ever used ChatGPT knows that an AI chatbot has a secret weapon that regular searches on Google or elsewhere don't have: Refining, which is asking a follow-up question that builds on the previous one. You ask a question, get an answer, and if there is something you don't like about the answer, you can add further specification. Like asking ChatGPT to write you a paragraph, and then telling it to rewrite it in a simpler style.

I would love something like this on Amazon. Amazon has a range of filters you can apply to search results, but those are far from covering everything. If you search Amazon for a "box", you can't for example limit the results by the size of the box. It is easy to see how AI could solve this problem. The question is whether Amazon or anybody else *wants* to solve the problem and provide you with better search results. On the one side, you could imagine an AI company that provides better searches than Google, or makes it easier to find a product than Amazon, to be able to compete with Google or Amazon. But if you give the customer what they want, instead of stuffing the option that is most profitable for you down their throat, how do you make money?

The quality of search results on Amazon is bad because of Amazon FBA, "fulfillment by Amazon", which enables anyone to use Amazon for dropshipping. You buy some cheap product in China, then sell it for some markup on Amazon, having slapped some added invented "brand name" onto it. Because this has been widely touted on the internet as a get rich quick scheme, for any given product there can be dozens of those invented brands, all selling exactly the same item. And you can get the exact same item even cheaper if you leave Amazon, and buy it directly from China via Temu. This is all very bad for the customer, but also bad for the competing dropshippers, who have to lower their prices constantly, and pay Amazon for search terms in order to be the one of many identical products that finally gets bought. Amazon makes more money by selling the search terms than they would make by cleaning up their store, removing all the dropshippers, and selling the item themselves. Amazon sometimes even uses a commingled inventory system, where all the identical items sold by different dropship "brands" are piled up together, and the customer gets a random one from the pile, regardless from which dropshipper he ordered. Which gets very weird if somebody adds a fake scam product to the commingled inventory, and somebody else's dropship operation gets bad ratings for the scam, because even Amazon can't tell anymore whose product they shipped. The quality degradation of a search on Amazon isn't intended, but clearly Amazon is willing to accept this disadvantage in order to keep selling search terms to the dropshippers.

Thus it could be said that the monetary value of a search is in the price difference between the actually cheapest option for a product and the inflated price of the product that the search result shows. While search *could* be better, regardless of whether that is by use of AI or by other improvements, it is not in the interest of the people that offer the search engines to make it better, as their profit increases the worse the search result is for the customer.