Seduced, betrayed, and Sold to the Highest Bidder
I too recall moving from Yahoo! to AltaVista, to Google, and being honestly astonished how the latter always seemed to find exactly the page that I needed. Yes, it was that good.
As years went by I added any number of Google products to my on-line life, and was generally very happy.
Then, maybe ten years ago, they started killing off great tools and services with no particular sense of caring that this would actually hurt people. Products like Gmail started getting interface "updates" that actually made them less useful and more annoying. Android seemed to become more annoying with every version, burying users under a torrent of notifications while locking out things that are actually pretty much essential for some people. At the same time Google demands repeatedly that I do things by yelling "OK Google" at my phone pr computer.
And, irony of ironies, Google Search has become nearly useless, with sponsored ads, shopping sites, and entirely irrelevant things taking over the first page of results.
The one Google product that might still be top of the list is Maps, but they've made the maps so low contrast that they're often un-readable. There's actually a plug-in that specifically adds contrast so you can see streets and names.
This is the year that I've actually moved most of my life out of Google, partly because of the data collection and sale of my information, and partly because so many of their products just don't deliver what is promised. NextCloud, Thunderbird, and my web host's email service cover most things, and arguably do it better than Google.
At this point the only products that I actually choose to use, and am generally happy with, are nice stable Open Source ones like Mint Linux and LibreOffice. I'm tired of battling some corporate code geek's idea of what would be the next Kewl Thing to foist on users. I don't want novelty, I want to get my work done.
It's sad, but I'm happy to just avoid Google at all costs.