If I'm reading the financials correctly, ads constitute just shy of $54b in earnings while Cloud just $6b.
As long as consumers are buying stuff, companies will advertise to them. As long as Google has a captive audience and they can continue to mint keywords for advertisers to bid against, I think this flywheel continues.
And yet their search product results are declining rapidly in terms of quality. So much so that people in HN report having to write "reddit" at the end of their queries to get reasonably interesting results.
Sure HN notices this first, but for sure the "regular people" are not far behind.
Still, there are no good alternatives -- yet. You can bet if Google is the new Altavista, then the new Google is just over the Horizon waiting to steal their ad revenue...
The declining quality we notice is likely because Google is getting better at serving everyone else. It's only going to get worse for handling off-mainstream queries, and it won't matter for most people who aren't looking for an obscure forum post from 1997.
As long as consumers are buying stuff, companies will advertise to them. As long as Google has a captive audience and they can continue to mint keywords for advertisers to bid against, I think this flywheel continues.