To me the ads are the content as well. Often times the tip search result is the same as the top advertisement.

This isn't by accident. Google has engineered it so that companies have to buy PPC ads for their own search results, to avoid 'competitive' PPC from rival brands.

True, but it isn't to maximize profit.

Ad bids are multiplied by a quality score which represents how useful the user will find the ad to be. An ad for the company searched for will be very useful to the user, therefore having a very high quality score, therefore the advertiser pays very little to have the top spot.

A competitor on the other hand would get a low quality score, and have to bid a lot to get the top spot.

It absolutely is to maximize profit - it's to extract surplus PPC budget out of businesses. Not a huge surplus no, but a surplus nonetheless.

G knows the boardroom shitstorm that ensues when a CEO Google's the company name and sees a competitor outranking them (& that it looks like an organic result).

There's therefore tremendous incentive for brands to park some 'defensive' PPC budget (and it's never clear precisely how much you need to be spending and of course your spend will be anchored by your spend on generics), and a lot of incentive for other brands to try to outbid (even if the net effect of those ads is as display ads snd they don't attract clicks).

Consumers meanwhile, will just click the first 'paid' link, meaning that G is getting 30c for a link click the brand previously would have got for free.

Google doesn't make that distinction for sites though. The ranking penalty applies even if the top heavy ads are highly related and complimentary to your content.

My mother has exactly one way to get to the Nordstrom e-commerce site: search Google for Nordstrom, and then click on the first authoritative-looking Nordstrom search result, which is an AdWords ad, landing her at the home page.

Seems expensive for Nordstrom.

Would a browser extension that just moved AdWords to the bottom of the page be banned from the chrome web store?

I'm sort of tempted to try this, but if so I guess I should start backing up my gmail account...

Tried this on a few search result pages, seems reliable so far.

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Are adblockers blocked from the Chrome store?

Desktop extensions aren't, but perhaps GP is remembering a similar situation with mobile ad blockers and the Play Store. https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/09/google-reverses-its-decisi...

Some are, usually youtube api abusers. They try to walk the line pretty well with their TOS.

1. Nordstrom would rather pay to keep the customer

2. Google charges a fraction for bidding on your own brand/website.

A woman in her sixties Googling for "nordstrom" is a Nordstrom customer.

Of course. That's why I said "keep" and not acquire. What I meant is Nordstrom would rather pay Google to not lose the customer to some other site because of the placement of ads on Google.

Sooner or later the new middleman will always start to behave like the old middleman. Before it was the yellow pages, now it's google.

It is - but if they don't Neiman Marcus will bid for that term instead and come up as the top result.