Not quite. It’s largely because a manager decided that an important metric for Google to be better at was “how much time users spend on the results page” which turns out you can game by just making the results worse so users have to stay there longer. Management made a decision to focus on metrics that are counter to what users would actually want because… well, here’s a better article that explains it:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Per the article, the exploit was fixed back in July. Weird to continue to use present tense to describe an exploit that doesn’t exist anymore.