It misses the point that many people don't use google, those search results from different search engines would similarly be impacted.
You should see the basic search page google hands me to use and has been that way the last 7 or so years. Then again, I used to be a very heavy user of google, multiple switches or operators for each advanced search, a habit from the times when that's all I did all day long. Before they made it hard for me, I bypassed their BS limit of f'all they eased in instead of the 100 results a page if one wanted and I crawled though multiple search pages and a few dozen results to land credible information to exclude echoes.
I know google results have dropped off the deep end, but framing reddit going dark as being of significant impact to search results is not honest. Yes, the result these people want is now inaccessible - it's not a new thing, results that are inaccessible are not unexpected. It's no different to the many deep searches I've done in the past and found what might have been useful results, were actually private unless one agrees to sell up their tracking data or the site was behind a pay wall.
I'd agree, Google and the like incentivised spam by shrugging for a start and then realising clutter gets more clicks and ads served.
I understand a lot of people are annoyed that many useful reddits are dark at the moment, a honest conversation would acknowledge that, rather than handing out prizes to those who the most upset about the protest.