From a business WHY are they doing this? There are at least two good reasons. The first is that it commoditizes the Internet further, which means more people

From a business WHY are they doing this? There are at least two good reasons. The first is that it commoditizes the Internet further, which means more people will use it to look at Google ads. The second is, as other people have said, that they can potentially get valuable data out of it. It's actually rather scary how few web sites Google is not able to keep track of, if you consider both ads, analytics and search traffic.