Agreed - they're moving up the value chain (why sell ads when you can just take the commission yourself). That said, it does feel inappropriate and I wonder at

Agreed - they're moving up the value chain (why sell ads when you can just take the commission yourself). That said, it does feel inappropriate and I wonder at what point Google's results will become the thing that they tried to differentiate from in the first place (previous search engines had ads placed throughout the results without scrutiny). Funny how they're moving from "these are the best results" to "these are the results that make us the most money."