a) Make organic results crappier, make paid ads look more like organic results. People may be more likely to click on paid ads. b) You'd think this. From what

a) Make organic results crappier, make paid ads look more like organic results. People may be more likely to click on paid ads. b) You'd think this. From what I've seen, mobile ads have up to 4x higher CTR with a as much as a 30% lower CVR. This is from multiple high spend accounts I have managed. Fat finger misclicks? Mobile ad "cards" also look almost identical to the organic result cards. Google used to roll major updates all of the time, now they come within 2 weeks of earnings releases, fairly consistently. Look for them to continue manipulate their black box (quality score) to help inflate CPCs, blend paid ads into organic (a la Baidu), reduce the number of organic results per page, increase the prominence of Shopping campaigns, remove advertiser control (no true exact match, or no exact match at all?) and generally try to squeeze SMBs by reducing organic visibility and subtly suggesting to try AdWords. Google's advertising business is at odds with providing the highest quality search results. They aren't really innovating in search, they're just turning dials to increase their earnings per mille for ads displayed.