They very much killed the golden goose. It's a real failure to think in terms of systems. Google relies on a healthy open web, yet as arguably the biggest single influencer of the web it has completely failed to maintain that let alone improve it.
It's not just the quality of websites that is negatively hit either. The real victims are us, civil society and our future.
The information realm that is the internet should provide not only some basic tidbits, it should inform to the full extent of human knowledge. Even more than that, it should provide us with the freedom to discuss among ourselves and reflect on ourselves, humans and humanity, about the future of society.
Without such self-reflection, there is only stagnation and retardation. We cannot change what we do not understand and we understand ourselves the least.
Plus we've all seen what this has lead to in meat-space. Information is one sided. BBC is supposed to be the paragon of neutrality, for example, and while it is pretty neutral on the situation in many places, it's not exactly neutral on UK and Australia political issues for example. And it suffers from the same problem as pretty much every other meat-space information source outside of libraries: the only information you can get from it is really quite superfluous.
Their recent "is AI evil?" series, for example, is neither neutral nor does it give enough information for people, even if someone wanted to go really in-depth on the issue, and have a really well-considered opinion, the only place where you could collect enough information to do that would be Youtube imho. With some blogs and maybe a scientific paper or two. Oh wait 3 out of those three work with a lot of help from Google (just try finding scientific papers without Google scholar)
I agree the situation is bad. But frankly, while Google perhaps has some blame in this, I'm very sure the situation would be 10x worse without Google.
You put up a false dichotomy, as if Google disappearing would mean a void to wander the world eternal.
The internet is very much like public infrastructure. It is crucial to explicitly determine what functions there are indispensable for society to thrive.
Ironically, finding available information is just such an indispensable utility. Imagine roads only being present or usable when conducive to advertisement.
There's also a big interest in tracking people for reason du jour.
I usually hear this "freedom of speech" stance until somebody hears something they don't like, then it's out the door and censorship gets a foot in the door.
As long as there is no consensus in society what speech is ok and what's not, we won't get anywhere. Currently, we are mainly leaving this to platforms to decide, and they cater to their customers (which are ad clients), not to what is best for society. Obviously there needs to be some moderation and banned contents. But a line needs to be drawn and anything beyond that needs to be free. No matter if some individual gets hurt by it or not.
I suspect that thanks to android phones collecting all of our offline data, and chrome collecting everyone's browsing history, Google no longer needs our web searches to collect the most intimate details of our lives which is why they aren't interested in spending time and money on their search product. In fact, the more useless google search is the more google can make companies pay for ads placed at the top of listings because if those companies don't pay up, their customers may struggle to find their site at all through all the spam.
I mean, if they can make billions by serving 99% of people, why would they spend billions on making the remaining 1% happy?
But we've been on a race to the bottom in most sectors for a long time now.
Google makes billions from advertisers - the companies who pay for ads, the companies who create those SEO-optimized marketing-pages. Those are the target audience, that Google wants to make happy.
Why would they care about us users? We don't pay for search.
The (not golden) goose lays golden eggs. The recurring time-based nature of the eggs is the key aspect of the fable.