The core of his point was the degradation of search results. How does that translate to him leaving "selling ads against search" out? I'm starting to think half the people commenting here didn't read past the 4th sentence
Has anyone done a scientific study, involving careful observation of quality of thousands representative queries on Google over a prolonged period of time? No.
If anything, the recent hysteria only shows how good Google has been at increasing people's expectation of search quality over the years.