These Wired click-bait headlines are terrible.
Can this meme die soon? Google is an ad company in the same way the New York Times is an ad company. Sure, that's ultimately where the money comes from, but there'd be no ad revenue if search, maps, mail etc weren't all among the very best available and that's a very real and very big engineering problem. Just like if the NYT stopped during journalism, their ads would stop generating revenue.