In 2019 Google issues a "Code Yellow" over worries it would not meet targets for search revenues in the quarter.
One member of senior staff was also concerned about the importance of keeping a firewall between the Search Teams and the Ads side of the business.

“Most headcount (non assistant) for search has gone into projects that are growth oriented. To the point, I worry that we are really not investing in research or speculation adequately,” Gomes wrote. “We could increase queries quite easily in the short term in user negative ways (turn off spell correction, turn off ranking improvement, place refinements all over the page).”

[finance.yahoo.com...]

Although this was 2019, this raises a number of issues, including:-
Clearly, there's an issue with the numbers of queries, and Google appears to be aware of that.
Its march towards more and more ads and revenues from ads is clear, and, for me, it indicates a house of cards.

Today, AI has thrown a spanner in the works, and Google must be struggling to work out how to monetize that.

The best days of search are over. I've said it before, and will say it again, a pure search service needs to come out of all this, imho. It could be done, but, are the companies bold enough to take those steps, especially when the bottom line is an issue.

[finance.yahoo.com...]