> What's more, Google was never in the business of "being a solid search engine". Google is and always has been in the business of selling access to users' eyeballs.

That's not how they became the darling of the tech scene though.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

> Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users [..] we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. [..] we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.