My understanding of it as an outsider is that Getty Images filed a suit against Google seeking money for their images being displayed in GIS results. They later announced a settlement, and the 'View Image' button disappeared and the search result quality plummeted (my judgement) at exactly the same time. Here's some more reading:

https://venturebeat.com/2018/02/09/getty-images-and-google-d...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after...