Unlimited greed is what eventually sinks a company. We saw it with AltaVista in the '90's (when the search results were all ads) and Google is slowly repeating this opening a space for a competitor to jump into.
I'm not sure this is a helpful characterization. Greed is also what helped the same companies get where they were before they went to shit.
The problem is that you can only grow so far in a market before the only way to keep the appearance of growth is to make your product worse, either by producing it cheaper (like Toblerone) or by monetizing it harder (e.g. ads in paid video subscriptions).
Optimizing the best result for each query can result in a terrible result for the minority of shoppers for that query. More importantly, it can lead to a terrible result for the majority of shoppers across many queries.
The problem is other considerations that A/B testing metrics often leave out (Satisfaction in the long term, in searches that dont lead to sale, and across multiple changes)
That is to say, on average most shoppers might want cheap shit for a given search. but sometimes, they might want a different/better product and get frustrated.
If you over optimize for the typical use case, you might still lose the typically user because they not typical in every way and every day.
This is what Amazon has done. They took their Marketplace and turned it into a search engine for the cheapest drop shipped product
https://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-49-inch-Odyssey-FreeSync-LC49...
There's a little box that says:
>Protect your purchase
>Coverage for drops, spills and breakdowns (plans vary)
If you click through you'll see that the plan specifically excludes drops and spills. Two of the three things they advertise for.
Like that's just fraud and someone at Amazon green-lit this knowing that it's just fraud. It's not optimization gone haywire. It's discovering that you can make money scamming people and not having any qualms about scamming your customers.
Maybe there are specific conditions, like it might help laundering or help deter competitors from entering their website, whatever that this scheme has a net positive gain for them, but this is insanity.
Theoretically being too greedy like that should open niche for competition with better product that's less exploitative but that is really hard if the near-monopolist on market is big enough or the product is hard enough.
Google too needs to be vigilant that it's decreasing utility isn't driving away users to a competitor.
It used to be that a fairly normal, mainstream company's purpose and goals were along the lines of "We make a product or provide a service, and doing that well enough/better than our competition makes us decent money."
Nowadays, it seems to be almost expected that the way a company operates is closer to "We are here to make as much money as we possibly can. If that means we have to make a product or provide a service, OK, but that's a necessary evil to the process of making absolutely ungodly amounts of money."
Google didn't get where it was before it went to shit because of greed. They got there because of genuine technical prowess, and a willingness to sacrifice possible revenue to provide an improved experience, with things like the bare-bones main Google page (as compared to things like Yahoo!, Altavista, and Infoseek when Google first appeared, which were laden down with all kinds of crap).
When greed took over, they shifted from the former mindset to the latter, and that's when things really started to go downhill.