They took the guy who led the legendary team that made the search not only work instantly at a previously unimaginable scale, but also freakishly well from a "finding exactly what you wanted based on almost any query," back in the late 2000s, if you remember... that guy, when he started pushing back against the people who wanted to fuck up search results to boost imaginary metrics that were theoretically (and, probably, not really) going to make more money from ads, they pushed him out.

This absolutely excellent article goes into detail about the exact moment, if you had to pick one, when Google stopped being a legendary tech company and simply became yet another behemoth coasting on its past successes until the market changes under it and it can't adapt, fades, and takes its place with all the others, all the way back to IBM and DEC. Nothing's changed in a big enough way for it to get knocked back into that obscurity yet, but it clearly will at some point.