> Much of the criticism Google received around Chrome and Search, especially around supposed conflicts of interest with Ads, was way off base (it's surprising how often coincidences and mistakes can appear malicious).

The author is refreshingly candid but hopelessly myopic.

Speaking as an outsider and a rather large advertiser, Google was great to work with in the early years (2004-2008). I founded the first search intelligence business in 2005 as a side business. Again, Google engineers were awesome to work with.

Then in 2009 or so, they began to get territorial. Some outsider sales person was brought in and IIRC, he bought a boat and named it, "AdSense". The engineering help disappeared. Within another year, some engineer in India told us our API access was going to be rescinded. We had extensive crawling capabilities but needed to correlate it to API data to give a holistic picture of the competitive AdWords landscape.

We spent the next two years gaming the system. We had 100 API accounts. We launched our own bare metal "cloud" with 1300 distinct IP addresses which we throttled to hit Google no more than once per minute.

This worked. We monitored Google in over 50 countries. Clients loved us because we could tell them exactly how they were doing on AdWords, both good and bad. Any intelligent person could use our data to improve their ads and excel. Our IPs would occasionally get banned but we would just temporarily shut them off and use one of our reserves. And even then, we eventually developed a crowd sourced solution to solve captchas which got them reinstated.

Another three years of the cat and mouse game passed. We were acquired by the world's largest advertising company.

Guess what? A call from the CEO to Matt Cutts ended the war. No promises were made but our access was simply restored. Everything worked again.

So yeah, Google is just like every other company in the world. The corruption has been there for at least 15 years. Please stop worshipping it.