Ugh, sensationalist crap. Yes, advertising on search engines is potentially corrupting. It is not necessarily a foregone conclusion, and I think that Google has

Ugh, sensationalist crap. Yes, advertising on search engines is potentially corrupting. It is not necessarily a foregone conclusion, and I think that Google has avoided "being evil" in regards to ads in their search results, for the most part. The really disingenuous part of this article is that Google does not own a monopoly on information, or information indexing. Nobody is "allowing" them to control information indexing; it's just good enough that there hasn't been a compelling need for an alternative. In fact, the author draws a parallel between public libraries and search engines - yeah, the government controlling our information indexes on the taxpayers' dime without any incentive to actually provide good results or to improve upon the system is obviously a better solution. The author, or anyone here, or some kid in his parents' basement is more than free to create their own completely open, free, self-funded information indexer (see: DuckDuckGo!). The problem, of course, is that Google provides much better, more complete, more comprehensive, more useful results for the vast majority of information indexing, because of the ridiculous amount of money and talent they've invested into solving these problems. As nice as the idea is, the world doesn't run on nice thoughts and good intentions - at the end of the day, that brilliant engineer that figured out how to return your search results 0.03 sec faster has to feed his family. Advertising in a search engine isn't inherently evil; it's dangerous, because advertisers will want to buy the first search results, and will often pay well for that privilege. The temptation of that offer is strong, but honestly? Google's big enough at this point that they've proved that they can be enormously profitable without having to sacrifice result quality. If anything, Google has made advertising more useful to me as a consumer, rather than allowing advertising to degrade my end-user experience. Google is successful because they've delivered consistently useful results, and then attached advertising to it, not because they've delivered advertised results and then the actually useful stuff 2/3's of a page later. I eagerly await the author's new, open, free-to-use, ad-free, as-good-and-fast-as-Google search engine. I'll use it if he'll deliver it, but he'll be too busy Googling quotes for his next article to make that happen.