Whether or not it's Google's fault depends on how much you attribute the development of the advertising-driving distraction factory internet to Google's business. We can debate whether or not Google was ever really in the search engine business – certainly at one point the search was a useful tool. Today, Google search is a sort of glorified Yellow Pages*. Their main product is selling ads in this Nouveau YP. The results their search engine returns are now heavily skewed towards revenue-generating sites. Such sites may incidentally be informative, but they are generally selling something.

Edit: see this other HN story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27993564

This is not to say that all search results are bought, although of course those are present now, too. But overall Google presumes that whatever the user is searching for, the best result is one where the answer is "buy this thing".

For those search results that don't lead directly to commercial products, the revenue generation is indirect: through the collection of user preferences and activity, Google can refine its search results towards maximizing revenue. At the very least, the result is likely to be a site that has ads, some of which generate revenue directly for Google.

*In the old-fashioned Yellow Pages book, you couldn’t really “search,” but there was an index by category. It had many of the issues inherent in categories, but it didn’t take an expert to find things. Google search eliminates the needs for anyone to understand a taxonomy of businesses.