It's likely a distaste at the culmination of a lot of anti-customer moves that Google has made over the last few years

Barking side, indeed

Google gave us a lot, but that does not mean they should not be criticized. Without emotion I can say that using Google is far worse today than it was in the early 2000s. Besides delivering the results in a much more readable format, at that time we were able to search specifically in forums and there were a lot of advanced features like "linkto:" that are not supported anymore.

The problem I see is that Google does not care about us Geeks anymore. They are 100% focused on consumers now, and that sucks a lot.

Criticizing is fine, sure but calling them they ruined the web? A bit stretched?

Google has done away with most of its original competitive advantages. Its biggest advantages now are its name recognition and its size. If Google had started off with paid search results and what-you-search-for-is-not-what-you-get we'd probably all still be using Altavista.

that's a rather simplistic and faulty argument. there are plenty of things wrong with "lure and then abuse" scenarios, and it isn't really an argument at all to say "but look at all the good the lure phase did".