I don’t think it really works this way (but hold on this isn’t going to be some corporate apologia). Companies don’t have morals, just responses to incentives and PR to build a narritive about it. Google was never not-evil; they were far enough ahead of everybody else to offer us all a really nice deal that was easy to spin as not-evil. They were an ad company more or less from the beginning, but a really rich one that had enough headroom to give us really nice services for free.

Now they are responding to the dual crunches of: their classic search techniques were insufficient to keep out folks who wanted things other than good search results to show up (SEO and the like). And they seem(?) to be losing to OpenAI and Anthropic on the “next thing” for organizing information, generative AI.