Of course there's some synergy between helping visitors and profit to Google, that's how business models work. And if you think that following the links to hotels.com and tripadvisor.com will get you more altruistic and unbiased information than the Google links then I'd like to sell you this fine bridge with air conditioning, great views and swimming facilities, which 93% of visitors rated as 4 stars or higher.
Back in the "10 blue links" day, the organics that showed, above the fold, were driven by factors that didn't include "Google's cut".
Similar for Google shopping. It's predecessor, Froogle, weighted on consumer factors. The replacement does not.
If the organics are basically bad now too, the blame goes to the same place. In fact, crappy organics encourage more ad clicks.
I don't know how to make such search terms useful again. Maybe by aggressively delisting anything that reeks of SEO, has ads or otherwise wants to sell something. If that filters out everything but the personal homepage of Johnny S. Hotels of Las Vegas, then so be it.
What about the business itself ? Would it survive if google told people it's closed when it's open ?
I'm asking because this is one of the high profile case that has been proeminently featured to showcase how the maps can have devastating effects.
There's a stark difference if you try to search for something where Google can net a big cut of the outcome. Try searching for "vegas hotels". Once upon a time, google returned a healthy mix of results that directly benefited them, and ones that didn't.
Here's the portion of the page (yellow rectangle) that now appears to be presented to actually help visitors, and not directly pay Google: https://imgur.com/a/hAFas On my PC, you have to scroll down 2 pages to see that.