They should have stuck with the charging money model instead of giving away services for the cost of attention.
There is a deep irony in Google becoming one of the greatest corporations ever on the back of an ostensibly socialist utopia business model. Everyone on earth with an internet connection can use the full suite of google products (which pretty much every person reading this chooses to use daily) without having social class be a limiting factor like it is with paid services. Litterally anyone with internet can access and use the same youtube and office suite that a billionaire on his yacht is using (perhaps the billionaire has yt premium though).
And here we are, 25 years later, and google is considered one of the most evil and malicious corporations, despite most people never paying them anything (and a large subset of those never loading one of their ads either).
From a high level POV, its an incredibly perplexing outcome. Compared to someone like Apple, who charges money, has zero openness, and prices to align with first world upper class, still being largely beloved.
You know, Google hinders competition. They are so powerful, they dictate the rules. If you do not play by Google's rules and align to their algorithms, you are allowed to consume, but not to provide. You have to pay them and others to even gain a small amount of visibility in their search results. The Google and YouTube algos are unfair as f*ck and promote the already successful.
Regular end-consumers didn't pay them anything. The people paying were corporations that advertised online. Through Google's publisher network (Adsense), their Doubleclick acquisition and the DART For Publishers middleware, and the ad buying tool (Google Ads), they completely price-fixed the market. Add to that "Jedi Blue", their non-compete cartel with Meta, and you can see Google is built on crime.