That's right- Larry wanted a question-answering machine. Larry and Sergey "got bored of search" (I heard this from the engs who were going to weekly presentations to show new search features) when they felt it was just chasing a larger index and showing people what they wanted to click on.
Meanwhile I long for the days where this was Google's focus. I want a better index of the web and I want the search engine to give me the tools to filter out the garbage I don't want. The fact that this isn't a feature tells you everything you need to know about Google's real priority: it's not us, it's the advertisers.
