My hypothesis is that at some point someone was given clearance to try a couple of plainly-evil things, and the results were so wildly lucrative that the "don't

My hypothesis is that at some point someone was given clearance to try a couple of plainly-evil things, and the results were so wildly lucrative that the "don't be evil" faction either defected or lost all sway. Notably, ads in-line with results. I suspect that was the first move that sent them irrevocably down the evil-path. Watch a non-tech-geek use Google and you'll see why—I bet ad-clicks went up 10x with that change, or more. Then they began to serve ads beyond those early "non-evil" clearly marked text-only ads. That led to them making tons of money from webspam sites, while also putting tons of effort into fighting webspam, and some time around '09 or so they realized they should lay off the latter, on account of the former. And here we are. Google search is worse, Google advertise deceptively on purpose, and the whole web is overrun with webspam.