No, that's not how online ads work or why Google makes money. Recall that AdWords is a money tree because online advertising by and large does not work but tar

No, that's not how online ads work or why Google makes money. Recall that AdWords is a money tree because online advertising by and large does not work but targeted search ads - emphasis on targeted - do. But targeted to what? They only work if they're targeted to commercial queries and basically are useful. Google has lots of systems in place to boost useful ads, defined as someone clicked it and didn't come back to keep searching or an ad that triggered a conversion action. It also demotes non useful ads, e.g. ads that aren't properly targeted. Ad campaigns thus don't "manipulate searcher's behaviours": if that were true, there'd be no need for Google to do anything about low quality or irrelevant ads as the mere act of seeing an ad would automatically make it relevant. People start doing commercial searches already knowing what they want, and ads are in a way a solution to the problem that the best organic PageRanked result for a query like 'flowers' might be a Wikipedia page on flowers, whereas almost certainly what the user actually wanted was a hyper-local result for a flower delivery service. Such services don't tend to accumulate much PageRank anyway, so need to be ranked some other way like via an auction. The rest of online advertising is no more able to manipulate people than billboards are. They raise awareness, if they're clever and memorable. That's about it. Brands that people know about do better than brands that people don't, unless that brand is good enough to spread via word of mouth, in which case they can win without advertising entirely. Which is how Google itself grew for most of its history.