> Most of the problems appear, superficially at least, to be consequences of advertising

Some trivia: Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page wrote about this in their 1998 paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine". [1]

  8 Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives
  
  Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of
  the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For
  example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of
  Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and
  risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because
  of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on
  the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone
  ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this
  type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising
  funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the
  consumers

They just did not know how destructive this conflict of interests would later be.

P.S. I'm a happy user of https://kagi.com! Definitely worth a Netflix sub per month, at least for programmers. :)

[1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf