> The primary purpose has always been improving search overall

That is what I believed, a long time ago, too. At this point I'd say this kind of thinking falls somewhere between idealistic and naive on a spectrum.

If better search were indeed the goal, we would have had better search a long time ago. But we don't. In fact, search gets worse over time, devolving into an ad-ridden mess freely gamed by SEO content farms, and now with a dumb-but-cheap-AI cherry on top.