Google can't still be awesome, as they're no longer seeking to disrupt an existing market and burning through venture capital while doing everything and anything (including providing superior search results, and making ethical business practices part of their brand) to attract users.

Rooting for a profit motivated transnational entity in the manner one would for a sports team exposes the insidious nature of brand narratives and the exploitable irrationality of our own interactions with them.

I believe they can, but I don't know if they care to - they're highly profitable after all. What I really dislike about search is that, by treating links as currency, they have broken links. Lots of people won't put plain old links on their site because they fear it would hurt their rankings.

Their overreliance on links as the sole quality indicator has, at least in my country, lead to the large media companies just renting out folders or subdomains - and whatever low quality content is published there ranks at the top.

They still build good stuff, and I'm sure their engineers could "solve" search again, but it appears that their management doesn't want to.

I've been getting those too, lately. I thought maybe that my touchpad finger is developing tremor ;)