Google played both sides and lost. They took a cut of all the SEO trash display ads, and all revenue from the search ads.

It seemed like a great way to make endless cash, but they double dipped and ended up breaking the web by hyper incentivizing trash content.

As predicted by many, DoubleClick killed Google. It took longer than people predicted, but you can’t play both sides forever.

Now what?

Google caused the fight when they started allowing things that would rank pages higher than others, other than actual content alone. Things like meta text overloading, or hiding gigantic walls of text in the HTML code, etc.

So, 1998?

"losing". I mean, are they even fighting back at this point?

Same question.