[ashrk]

I'm not sure what exactly you're referring to, but as someone who's used Google since back when it had a bunch of serious competitors, I'd also pick 2008-2010 as about the time they stopped even appearing to match words with actions and became just another company, from an outside perspective, at least. It surprises me that people are just now forming this opinion about them.

Perhaps not coincidentally that's about when the fundamentally-a-bad-idea service of Facebook started to get huge as it grew past college campuses, and showed it was really easy—like, incredibly easy—to convince all these new Internet users to give strangers tons of information about themselves, in gross violation of previous Internet norms of avoiding posting personal info anywhere, and that one could make stupid amounts of money by facilitating these poor choices.