I don't think the main reason for the change is advertising. I think it is simply Google being tuned more for average people, so Google-fu is no longer needed a

I don't think the main reason for the change is advertising. I think it is simply Google being tuned more for average people, so Google-fu is no longer needed as much as it was before. I see it as a generally positive thing, but I agree that pattern matching is probably still useful for advanced users which should be opt-in.