A conspiracy theorist looking at Google's ad clicks numbers might say that better results equal less clicks on ads. Mind you, that on commercial searches essentially all you see is ads. This works up to a point, a tipping point that is. I think Google is unusable now for commercial searches, all you see is ads and eBay, Amazon and other megacorps.

Up to a few years ago, I would have never believed that Google crafted results to increase ad clicks but now I do. Looks like MBAs from fancy colleges have taken over everything. Their ad clicks are increasing by a suspiciously large percentage each quarter.

They are back at page one: "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.

For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results." http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html