As ad blockers have become popular and the demand for continual growth has remained steady, the costs they accepted to hide their evil were the first expense to get cut.
Whatever else you might think about what Google is doing, this is certainly not true.
Google gained dominance precisely because its search results were vastly superior to any other. I was a web developer even back then, and clearly remember trying to struggle with the results of Yahoo or AltaVista or DogPile, etc. There's just no question that Google won because of higher quality results.
And at that time there was also a lot of controversy about their competitors selling search positions, so you could outright buy the #1 slot, for example. Google never did this, and always maintained a policy of maintaining a clear distinction between organic results versus ads. The line may have become less bright over time, but it's always been possible to discern which items on the results page were "real" and which weren't.
You can criticize them for having decreasing commitment so they're not as bold about the ideals, but I don't think it's fair to say that they never cared, or even that they don't care anymore.
I would not call a tiny label saying "Ad", with the same color as the text right next to it, a clear distinction.
When using a browser without an ad blocker, I often click on ads by accident.
It's very far from the clearly distinguishable background that ads used to have, and designed to be easily overlooked.
They do exactly that on mobile, and if you watch non-geeks use Google they cannot reliably spot the ad versus the "natural" results. Hell, I tap the ad about half the time, because I'm in a hurry and don't look closely enough, and they've extorted the owner of whatever company I'm searching for to pay for their own name so the top result is an ad for the thing I obviously wanted to find anyway.
You had a lot of services that were literally amalgamations of all the other searches. They would would automatically go search 3, 4, 5+ other search engines because they all sucked in their own way.
And then google came along. Google was good enough that the approach of sifting through multiple search engines wasn't necessary. All those other search engines disappeared practically overnight. No one who experienced google would touch anything else.
google today might not be as technically superior anymore since we as a species understand the search space better, but at the time? google was absolutely game changing.
Also one reason their search was so much better, was that they refused to sell search result placements.
... but if the money isn't there in ads in the future, I don't expect the company to just curl up and die. It'll be interesting to see what comes next when "The smartest people" need to find something to do.
We’re all going to be left in a Wall-E universe though unless they help fight climate change.
Problem is, while there's certainly money in applications of AI (the ad auction is one of them), it's unclear that "AI" as a discipline is a money-factory like ads is. Google's looking for a money factory to replace ads because they're worried about that revenue stream being fragile (for the reasons ocdtrekkie highlighted).
"The smart people" provided a recipe for preventing/fixing climate change several decades ago. The politicians have never gone along, and now it's pretty much too late. It's no use hoping for a magic technical solution -- the one that would have worked was "Tax externalities and reduce CO2 emission".
Why?
Internalizing externalities with a tax only works if the actual correct amount of those externalities equals or exceeds the amount that would reduce demand for fuel enough to stop climate change.
This is a huge assumption that I never see anyone even acknowledge needs to be demonstrated.
I think in fact they are far less, but my point is that debating that would be a red herring, since people seem to talk of externalities while never even believing in the concept, and that tension needs to be resolved.
The externalities are a number that in principle has a correct value, and the increase in price to change behavior sufficiently to stop warming is another number that independently has a certain value. But you have to have a logical reason for thinking they match if you think internalizing the costs is a solution.
A definition that calls that evil also calls auto manufacturers evil because of the car accident rate.
Eventually, as we saw, they couldn't help themselves -- Maybe just one little oppression platform wouldn't be such a big deal...