They commanded an absurd premium on ads by virtue of being monopolistic leaders of search. They don't have a better product anymore, only a scale/distribution advantage.
They presumably were doing it to increase "engagement". More time spent getting infuriated with their worsening search meant more time seeing their ads.
They deserve to go under.
Meanwhile 1 minute unskippable ads on 30s YouTube videos, pop-ups on mobile that cover the video when you close an ad. I hope the UK TV ombudsman grows some balls and starts applying the law on advertising-to-tv-programming ratio. It needs to be applied when programs have ads in them too.
This is such a funny comment, historically you bought stocks to extract profits, ie dividends. Now you make money from houses and stocks by value appreciation instead of rent and dividends, you can see how that leads to very different behaviours and how that is not very stable compared to buying based on rent and dividends.