I mean, there's always been a grey area even when it came to tiny snippets in the results, though those actually encouraged you to click through when you found the right result.

The beginning of the end was including Wikipedia entries directly in the search results, although arguably even some of the image results are high quality enough to warrant skipping visiting the actual website (if you were lucky enough to get the image at the target site in the first place) So maybe it goes back sooner than that.