I'm going to share an unpopular response to one of the points in the article: For explicitly commercial terms, ordering results by who will pay the most (i.e. p

I'm going to share an unpopular response to one of the points in the article: For explicitly commercial terms, ordering results by who will pay the most (i.e. putting ads at the top) isn't any worse than the organic algorithm's ordering. That's because the organic algorithm doesn't really have a way to distinguish between different commercial offerings. Take a search for "apartments in denver". There are ~10 online rental listing websites, all with roughly the same buildings on them and approximately equivalent user interfaces. In other words, it's hard to distinguish between them on the basis of content. Those ten sites are going to fill the first page of results, so the question is which ones get the top couple spots (and the bulk of the traffic.) Now, one of these may be the "best" result for you, but even you probably can't tell that in advance, and it's hard to imagine how Google's algorithms could discern whether apartments.com or forrent.com will have the perfect 1-bedroom with granite counters in your desired neighborhood. All of those websites want to be in the top spot, so they spend a lot of money generating SEO-oriented content and trying to earn links from high quality sources. People talk about SEO as "free" traffic, but believe me -- for a competitive commercial term, you're paying for that traffic. You're just paying for it in an indirect, obfuscated way. With that in mind, why not just have people pay for traffic directly? SEO lets sites spend (say) $1 million in an incredibly laborious way to earn the top spot on a bunch of terms and get 1 million clicks a year on those terms. Why not just let them spend that million with Google directly? The net result is less wasted effort. Note that I'm only talking about clearly commercial terms.