"Somehow a homemade problem for Google."
Wow, I thought you were going to talk about selling ads and how that has made search shite.
well, Selling ads in general wasn't a problem 15 years ago.
The pre-AI enshitification-part where they realized that worse search-results means more searches so more ad-revenue is another story.
If they wouldn't have done that, they could be the proof that a well-maintained search-engine is still better than a LLM.
But now this will never happen, as no-one will be willing to give up that additional search revenue while overall usage is going down...
Google always sold ads. Google weren't always shite, though.
They, themselves, sorta proved that a good product could become dominant with ads and without being shite.
Or degrading their keyword operators to be more mobile friendly