Letting advertising in. Advertisers always seek to get favorable placement, treatment, more of everything. The old newspaper thing about editorial independence was always aspirational, if not an abject lie.
Strictly from a business standpoint, letting advertising in was Google's best decision. I don't see how platforms like Gmail or YouTube would exist today without it.
Agreed...the user quality has fallen so much due to the advertisers preference. But it's also hard to imagine how they could have built such a long-lasting business without monetizing via ads...what would be another route to sustainable business and service?
Do you have a deck from the very early days, like 1998 or 1999, in which Google say that they will monetise the service via ads?
I am not so sure ads were the initial business plan. I think the initial plan was to take care of search for portals like Yahoo! and eventually sell the company to them. Larry and Sergey at one point asked Yahoo! for $ 1 B, were told “no”… and the rest is history.
Google let ads corrupt search.