Agreed. What made me (and presumably the author) post this article is not the relevance of the result, but how much of the page is now taken up by advertising.

Agreed. What made me (and presumably the author) post this article is not the relevance of the result, but how much of the page is now taken up by advertising. I'm a marketer, so I do certainly like advertising, but what irks me is the sheer vertical volume of the page taken up by monetized ads. Google does not consider a site quality of the top 1/3 of the page is ads, yet here they take the space on the page which has the most attention. It is their search engine, yes, but at the same time I think no one can argue that they are making the monetized links take up more and more space in order to boost CTR and their bottom line. They are a company after all, so it shouldn't come as much of a surprise.