>OF COURSE I want new products. But I want ones that become popular because they're good, not because someone paid to shove them in my face when I was looking f

>OF COURSE I want new products. But I want ones that become popular because they're good, not because someone paid to shove them in my face when I was looking for something else. You want new products, and you want organic search results, but you don't want ads to promote a product. You just want heuristics that can determine what's a good product (or other search result) and show it to you even when no one has ever seen or evaluated the product before. (If everyone blocked all ads and all spam, how would you bootstrap a new product? Spamming bloggers?) That's called a nondeterministic algorithm. An algorithm that magically "does the right thing." >This is true now, but it wouldn't be true if we could get rid of advertisers completely and only have word of mouth and organic search results. Because no one will ever be able to exploit those magical heuristics you're positing above. Waiting for word of mouth to promote a product is equally magical thinking, unless you have unlimited money to burn. If someone has put up the investment to create a new product, they don't have time to wait for potentially years for the product to end up popular. You need to fail or succeed quickly. Just developing a product sometimes needs enough eyes to get the feedback you need to improve your product to be useful, to tune the product to be what people need. You want the awesome new products, but only after other people have vetted them for you. Other people who have looked at and evaluated product they've found through ads. Which you don't want to look at. Read about Kant's Categorical Imperative to understand my opinion of that behavior.