> if your goal is to maximize the next few quarters results and don't care if you crash the company.

Also makes sense if you are optimizing a metric and only considering the data, not where it is leading you.

I had a scenario today where I looked something up and the search result page yielded zero results. However, there were 3-4 ads above and below the text that said there were zero results.

It could be a situation where Google doesn't mean to do it, but also isn't incentivized to fix it. The people who make the most money off Google have the most time and motivation to find ways to manipulate it to protect and increase their profit. Anyone at Google who wants to fix it is incentivized to come up with new features for promotion rather than bugfix.