> because online advertising by and large does not work but targeted search ads - emphasis on targeted - do. as an adsense and adwords user i'm very skeptical

> because online advertising by and large does not work but targeted search ads - emphasis on targeted - do. as an adsense and adwords user i'm very skeptical about the effectiveness of targeted ads beyond exact keyword matching in general. Keyword-based ads work great, because they are answering exactly what the user is searching, but people rarely search "what should i vote". Other forms like display advertising are also quite effective, depending on the kind of product one wants to advertise (that's why google bought doubleclick). I don't know of any studies with statistics that corroborate google's pricing of ads with their effectiveness. That said, all advertising is manipulative by definition. Not just advertising, most media reporting is also manipulative to the degree that everyone has biases. > 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 I think you are also misstating how adwords works. Google doesn't care if your ad is about the best flower shop, but how much you are willing to pay to rank before others in ads.