A combination of self-preferencing (upranking Amazon's knock-offs), pay-for-placement (ads), other forms of payola (whether a merchant pays for Prime), and #JunkAds (that don't match your search) turn Amazon's search-ordering into a rigged casino game.
The ability to manipulate customers and sellers and get more money from both explaiins Amazon's incentives to use its internal search tool, rather than, say, searching Amazon via Google, which can yield *far* superior results.
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But *everyone* loses in this "two-sided market." Amazon used #JunkAds to juice its ad-revenue: these are ads that are objectively bad matches for your search, like showing you a Seattle Seahawks jersey in response to a search for LA Lakers merch:
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Amazon.com Inc. doubled the number of junk ads to boost profits and deleted internal communications to thwart a federal antitrust probe, according to fresh details released by the US Federal Trade Commission in a less redacted complaint against the online retail giant Thursday.
Cory Doctorow