but google is editing your queries without your knowledge, so they can milk more money out of their advertisers.
That came from a wired article which was quietly retracted because the author had misunderstood a slide from the Google anti trust trial and had the meaning nearly backwards.
What Google is actually doing is allowing advertisers to match keywords to common synonyms and other relevant keywords. If you search for (insert brandname) infant sleepwear for example Google will also show ads from adverts from companies who selected the keywords “baby pajamas”. And that specific keyword replacement was only relevant to advertising"…
Google has long been transparent about the fact they interpret the meaning of keywords for searches to try to improve their relevance, and if you think about it if Google was replacing low value keywords with higher value ones it would be obvious, as generic searches would only turn up stuff from luxury brands and ads wouldn’t have broad keyword matching.
There are plenty of things to blame Google for, the low return on advertising that publishers get and the increasing need for the entire Internet to be locked behind millions of different paywalls, SEO optimization, click bait bullshit, link farms, but one of them isn’t replacing keywords to maximize value.