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Yes. Google did not invent spidering, search engines or anything else like that. They did it more comprehensively and presented it better than anyone else. Instead of being greedy and stupid like almost all the rest, the presented a useful search interface (and still do) free of extraneous junk like ads. They had a long term vision and now place ads within the search results, sometimes to excess. But they know like everyone else that they will be replaced if they go too far.

I completely disagree. In some categories, the entire first page is paid placement. You may have to go to the third page to find popular local businesses over national ads. I have found Google to become less and less useful as they sell more and more advertising. I say this as a Google advertiser who is also finding them becoming less and less effective FOR the advertiser as they make their ads more granular and more expensive by that granularization. They claim it makes them more targeted, but that really means it costs more to get your message to greater numbers of callers.

I used google for years but when I installed track-me-not they started to bother me with verifications. So I kicked them out and use bing which is about 90% as good. For crucial searches I go back to google

Bing maps works just fine/ Bing image search is good

I am also a Google advertiser and it is very expensive to get the right ad with granular criteria. But if you don't do that, you pay for hits for loose criteria that snags people who do not want your product. You pay almost as much for those hits but the criteria are too loose.

What you say is true now, but that was not how Google became successful. The became a success by refraining from junking up their home page. They slowly started adding ads to the first results page but even now those are still identified and discrete. There is no question they had the right strategy, minimalism, to get successful. But my main point was that they invented or innovated nothing to do that. They simply did it better.