Oh search sure, but I thought they would get more views on things like DoubleClick ads embedded in other pages.

Search ads are the majority of google's revenue. They make money on ads embedded on other pages but nothing like they get from search ads.

Searches are also what drive relevance on other pages' embedded ads. Because you search on Google, they know how to target ads when you are browsing elsewhere.

For Q3 2016 Google earned over 70% of its revenue and 80% of its advertising revenue from "Google websites" [1].

Google websites include search as well as YouTube, Gmail, et cetera. AdSense, AdMob or DoubleClick revenues make up the bulk of the other 20%.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204416... pages 31, 33

Good to know. I guess I have trained myself over years to skip the "sponsored results," and did not expect for them to be so important.

They are way more effective than basically any other form of online advertising, because the user has effectively just typed "I have intention to purchase X" into the search engine, and you as the advertiser get to be the first result they see.

(Also most people honestly don't know the difference between sponsored results and real search results)

A search ad is worth way more. Someone browsing the news isn't necessarily looking to spend money. A person searching for a book title(or any item or category) is probably looking to buy it. That data, intent data, is the key to their success in ads, because the person seeing the ad is way more likely to convert

The RPM (revenue/thousand pageviews) on non-search pages is significantly lower than on a search page since the intent is not there.

Revenue per search is at least an order of magnitude higher (maybe 2) than revenue per ad view.

Yahoo has three of the most popular sites on the internet: sports, news, and finance.