The last time I whined about this kind of thing, someone on HN patiently explained to me that this is the "invisible hand" at work. A certain number of people c

The last time I whined about this kind of thing, someone on HN patiently explained to me that this is the "invisible hand" at work. A certain number of people click a spam link, ignore the content, and try another link. Some click through on an ad, that's a win for Google. Some get disgusted with stuff like this, Mahalo, and so forth and those users defect to another engine. As long as the increase in revenue outweighs the loss of users, Google has no incentive to change. In fact, they have an incentive to make their search "worse." There is a stereotype of an MBA that runs a business with a spreadsheet, firing people that embody the company's institutional knowledge and outsourcing their "function" to body shops in another time zone. The stereotypical numbers-driven MBA carefully manipulates prices and product supply to maximize revenues, balancing price discrimination against the loss of customers. The end result is a company that is hostile to its customers. Cell phone companies and airlines come to mind. I would compare this to Google, except it's even worse in a sense, because users are not Google's customers. Advertisers are Google's customers. There must be voices within Google arguing passionately for improving the quality of its results from the user's perspective. I imagine that the response from management can be taken straight out of the movie "Blade:" For fucks sake, these people are our food, not our allies.