Google started to go to shit around '08 or '09, allowing their results to be taken over by ad-spammers and a handful of top sites. At the same time, that's about when they adjusted search to make it extremely hard to narrow in on something obscure, even if you know for a fact it's there (this used to be a thing one could reliably do, with some guesswork about word and phrase rarity in the target page and in link text pointing at the target page).

2010ish sounds right to me, APIs used to be widely available and accessible, which still left a way for people to have control over how they used the internet.

But maybe the API was ultimately a trap. A la "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". Offer an API to encourage adoption, and then start restricting it later.

Which got us to leave our federated platforms with open protocols and enter closed silos.