It's essentially a machine for printing money and people don't really understand what they're giving up in exchange for "free" search results. Google is beholden to market forces, it's no longer in the business of indexing useful information because the market doesn't value useful information, it values ad revenue.

This is a structural problem and anything that gets large enough will succumb to the same forces. If the incentives are for optimizing ad revenue then that's what all corporate machines will do at scale, regardless of their initial motives and incentive structure. It doesn't help that Google is also an ad network, hence the ouroboros aspect.

You say it's a machine for printing money in a topic about people complaining that it doesn't work any more. It may have been but it won't be forever if things keep going the way they're going. Quality content is already being locked away.

We're in agreement. I don't think quarterly earnings are the right way to design and build products. Maximizing profits is not correlated with value and is often inversely proportional to it. Google was so successful that they changed the incentive structure of all content on the web. Now they're like the yeast drowning in the byproducts of their own metabolic processes. They exploited whatever nutrients were available (hand curated links) to make them initially successful and now there is no more worthwhile content being generated that is not designed to rank highly on Google (which is not the same thing as quality content and is instead content optimized for generating ad revenue from the Google ad network).

It's the same with social networks, upvotes and likes skew the the type of content that is generated to be liked by the people liking and upvoting instead of being insightful. Popularity is not the same thing as insight so the social web is full of mostly useless but popular content.

Well, if it makes you lads feel any better, we're not the only ones who feel this way

Paul Graham has been pushing for someone to disrupt web search on and off for at least the last 10 years: http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

(he tweeted about it more recently, but I couldn't dig it up since I'm not much of a tweet man)