Krebs wrote (the single piece of support you have for your reading, right?): >>> Wow, this is gold. The post critiques the practice of displaying ads above se

Krebs wrote (the single piece of support you have for your reading, right?): >>> Wow, this is gold. The post critiques the practice of displaying ads above search results, a method used by some of Google's competitors back then. At the time Google published this, it only put ads in the sidebar to the right of search results: >>> (emphasis mine) The thing is, the only allowance we have to make for everything to be entirely consistent with both Krebs' other statements and the other interpretations which he has not challenged (unlike yours, which he directly did contradict in the quoted post [in the prior comment, that is], that was why he posted that, responding to that [I guess?] googler who took the same reading as you) is the following: Simply that he wrote "displaying ads" here to mean "paid top results". All that needs to be true, and not even strictly a mistake, is that it's reasonable to call a paid top result an ad. That seems reasonable. Everything else here immediately falls into place. Your reading requires a lot more stretching to reach, including assuming some uncharitable things about Krebs, as far as I can tell. The only other thing in support of your position is the statement near the end of the above about where Google used to place ads, but that's easily read as emphasizing how far they have come, compared with where they started, and providing context of the state of their search page when they released this statement. Krebs made two other posts highlighting that his concern is about how hard they make it to tell their ads from search results. The charitable and most straightforward reading, also consistent with the document he posted, is that he either intended the above, or made a tiny slip in one place. It also seems to be the way most people read it. Unless you think he's bullshitting in his clarification, you did not read it the way it was intended. [EDIT] Meaning-preserving brain-fart fixes, sorry, tired as hell.