To understand what I mean by "imaginary" you have to understand (and accept) that a dollar, or a pound, or a real, or whatever, represents our agreement that we'll all play the same game. It doesn't represent a real thing. Google and Facebook provide information about actual things, like people, places and events.
Money provides information about itself. Which, hey, I like having an agreed-upon exchange rate so I can trade my labor for stuff (RIP Carlin). The problem is that exotic derivatives create an insane level of abstraction to the terms of our social agreement. Once you take away the ability of people to understand what money is for (I mean, seriously, buying insurance against the failure of a company you don't own? slices of a house's future value?) that agreement starts to corrode.
And yeah the short-term profits of these abstractions does create PROFIT, but it's an unsustainable cash flow. It didn't arise from producing a better quality product.
To say that Google's search service and CDOs are essentially the same thing shows a pretty poor understanding of both concepts.
Google and Facebook, for example, merely provide a convenient way of getting information quickly. Markets and price discovery do the exact same thing.