Number aside...18% or 21.47% the trend is obvious to everyone. (I know you don't believe what you wrote but you had to say it anyway. Google's attitude changed

Number aside...18% or 21.47% the trend is obvious to everyone. (I know you don't believe what you wrote but you had to say it anyway. Google's attitude changed in 2004 when you added ads on top, so attitude shifts to justify whatever you do. See Google's attitude on the original Pagerank paper) Ads are as helpful as content? First there's a major conflict of interest since you control both ads and content. One update and content shifts, making ads by default better or worst. A tiny shifts not noticed by 99% of people can increase your profits by a wide margin. A tiny shift here and a Panda shift there and your revenue reaches $50 Billion a year, or a huge cut of the total e-comm trade. If I search for Adidas 2012 VX Shoe (made it up) and I see 3-4 ads on top, why are they more helpful? Because they have it, because they have most reviews, cheapest price or what? In every case I have tried advertising it's the ad price difference, especially among top merchants. Of course that ad price is added to the consumer one way or another so nice try, portraying this as a helpful thing. Equally as important, the sites that lost traffic due to more ads are forced to go out of business or advertise /increase bids. A vicious cycle, induced by Google, to benefit Google. >> And of course there are tons of searches where we don't show ads. There is no money in many searches, that's known, nothing altruistic about it. You show ads where you have ads and where it is profitable, in key markets. >> Not to mention that our ads aren't just a straight auction; we try to take into account things like the quality of the destination page in deciding whether and where to show ads, just like we do with web search results. The difference between Geico, Progressive, All State et al is just the ad price and CTR, in sum how much money you make from them. The best site for the user would be a comparison site or maybe a CNN Fortune article that compared them. The real questions: Should Google be trusted to rank organic search in an unbiased manner when they have a huge incentive to manipulate them, quarter by quarter? The only sure thing, unless Google is lying to SEC, is that Google's profits are increasing by an extraordinary amount after all these changes were made. Is it good for the economy and for the web to have one company that controls both ranking and ads? Google control as much as 95% in some EU countries and roughly 70% in USA. You are talking about monopoly territory.