That could be

- More ads, in places where organic used to be - Lower quality organic results

From where I sit, neither of those reflect an engineer's preference. I'd be more interested in hearing an explanation for a runaway ad click growth than hearing a very specific denial.

Who's "we"? Are you Larry Page to speak with such confidence? Nope, just a lowly engineer being observed by hundreds of Stanford and ivy League MBAs as your changes impact Ad Clicks, the golden eggs.

I'm one of the people who makes changes to Google's rankings. As a result, for any change I want to make, I have to collect the statistics to justify it. This is done with the help of an analyst who has a different reporting chain from the ranking engineers in order to ensure that they remain unbiased. These statistics include things like what results people click on, how often people hit "next page," how humans rate the results before and after the change, etc. (None of these statistics involve ads or revenue in any way.) Once we've collected those statistics, the analyst writes up a report about the change summarizing their findings and pointing out any areas of concern.

This report is then presented at a weekly launch meeting, where the ranking leads review each change both for its metrics and for its complexity, ongoing infrastructure cost, etc. and make a decision about whether to launch it. You can view an example launch meeting here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtRJXnXgE-A

If your mental model of Google is a bunch of MBAs who tell engineers what to do, you're quite incorrect. That's Microsoft.

I am not arguing whether Google breaks a law or not, I simply say that they hurt the smaller players. Getting rankings is getting harder and harder with each update. Soon, paying for AdWords will be the only affordable option.

To an extent (and in some cases, I except that there are exceptions) this holds true:

If I google for a video streaming website I want Youtube to be at the top of the list. Semantically that is the correct answer to the "question" implied by the search.

So:

Are google services popular because they are highly represented in google's search results?

-OR-

Are google services highly represented in google's search results because they are popular.

I absolutely do not believe that google should feel pressured to artificially demote its own offerings over fears of anti-competition litigation/legislation. On the other hand I can see an argument for clearly marking a result that points to a google service as 'belonging' to google.

The logic in my mind is -- Google wants the rankings to be unequivocally trustworthy, e.g., if I'm searching for an espresso machine, would I trust a small ecommerce shop where the experience could be terrible or do we just throw an Amazon or Bed Bath and Beyond result at the top because those are vetted companies.

Sure, the little guy has to grind to get a better ranking and free traffic, but it should in the long term encourage better behavior by companies as they attempt to earn that trust.

http://i.imgur.com/vFwD9xr.png

And for what it's worth, this is the result I got just now in the UK: http://i.imgur.com/YHXngwR.png

yes, google shows a lot of ads for a vague, contextless search query. but nobody ever searches for anything so vague unless they're trying to prove how google search results are going down the toilet. if you search for the name of a category of information, it's impossible to know what aspect is relevant to you and you're either going to get ads or irrelevant results, and google has chosen to serve ads instead of irrelevant results..

try searching for bitcoin mining, bitcoin exchange, etc, and you'll see relevant results.

flights from los angeles to las vegas

Not sure if the organic results are relevant, because I can't see any.

http://i.imgur.com/Ed0UYER.png

This is kinda fun. I'd like a website that showed screenshots of popular search-results on Google from across the world.

(With adwords you will only see the traffic from the keywords you decided to bid on, while webmaster tools will show all the organic traffic, including segments you didn't know about).

Ma and Pop's widget shop is a wordpress clunker built by their teen son. He's not spending 20 hours a week watching metrics and messing with SEO. $big_shop_webmaster certainly is.

So are many web servers, why would this affect ranking? Content, not platform should be the determiner (though some hosted content might get penalized because of others using the same host).