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...