I was alive, and my memory is quite different: web search was way more useful back then. Yes, sure, the search engines were simpler. They were more about searching exact text phrases, and less about "guessing" what you meant, or auto-correcting the spelling in your query. But the web itself was different too - a web search with the engines back then usually returned a list of sites relevant to what I was searching for. These days, so many google searches result in a long list of clickbait, crappy content farms, shopping sites, fake "review" sites, fake blogs, malware/crapware download sites, sketchy "best price search" sites, and so on and on. IMO web search just keeps getting more useless over time.

However, in a pre-google web, most sites would add thousands of keywords to their meta tags, hoping that even when the site was not relevant for most of those keywords, they would get the click, get paid by the ads and be incentivised to create more.

And since in those days the concept of relevance (and all that the page rank brought) was still far away, the sites themselves had to catalogue themselves, thus creating the keyword spam.

I remember jumping between search engines; Excite, Altavista, Yahoo, and not getting very relevant results.

But there was nothing I remember back then like Wikipedia. Encarta? Extremely limited in comparison. (Or anything then that was like Amazon, for that matter.)

Google is primarily a search engine, as a product. Google shooting itself in the foot by not showing the best results, harms their reputation.

People already go directly to Amazon to search for things to buy. That has been a constantly growing trend for 15+ years. If Google's product goes backwards when it comes to delivering results people want, that will drive more people directly to Amazon and accelerate the trend of going straight to their site to search for things to buy and bypassing Google.

Google has likely already maxed out on search usage in the US, including on market share. Meanwhile online retail is still only ~11-12% of all US retail. That online share will double in the next ten years roughly. Amazon will be the size of Walmart, in retail, in another seven or eight years, further massively expanding its actual customer use.

Amazon easily wins that battle with Google. All of the expansion over the next ten years is on Amazon's side. Meanwhile Google has an aging, maxed out product in search, and a maxed out product in Android (annual global smartphone sales growth is near zero).

On another note, I'm often amazed at organizations this big don't crumble overtime with so many moving parts. It's practically impossible to be without fault.

Mass connectivity and the sorts of companies that entails might contribute, but financial structures are responsible for most of it.

Public corporations and investment firms decouple capital from production. The neoclassical economic theories establish this as a reasonable approach to a liquid market, but they fail to account for a few things, including mode of production, which comprises the means and relations of the production process. Whereas specialization brought efficiency to production, these recent arrangements remove production from sight, altogether. Our financial system is essentially just optimizations for doing this type of business, and other industries have followed suit. Monopolies are among but still the least of our problems.