The cynical assumption would be that they're just sitting on the extremely vast hoards of money and greedy for more. The (slightly) less cynical assumption is that their interest in Search nowadays is as a piggy bank for projects they consider more important.
Worth noting though the latter has long been the going assumption internally at Google: Search was the cash cow that funded Google's expeditions in finding the Next Big Thing. This plan has been complicated by the appearance that Google seems to not be terribly good at the kind of product execution that would lead them to the Next Big Thing.
My two cents is that Google has been consumed by its performance review process; the amount of money made by advancing dwarfed the amount of money made by making advancements, and as always the metric was the outcome.