I think Danny Sullivan over at Searchengineland has done a better job of chronicling the changes but to give you a flavor, the size of the ad space before the first organic has grown tremendously, the injection of Google properties (G+, Youtube, etc) has further pushed on search results. When a buying intent is detected the 'shopping' bar activates which only shows shopping results from people who advertise on Google, etc.

An interesting experiment is to look at every link on the search results page and try to figure out how many don't generate cash for Google, its getting harder to find more than one, yet when Google was started it only profited from the ad-links.

As others have mentioned search has changed. There is no longer a big push for 'finding things on the web' which was the appeal of early search engines, now the bulk of the web use search as their portal to a giant reference library and product catalog. One of the things Google tried to monetize and failed was reference information (Knol) so now more and more they just show you the fact you were looking for, scraped from some web page, right on their page, no need to click away.

I think it was a smart move on their part from the shareholder perspective (disclosure I sold all my Google stock at $650 :-(). The second order effects though will be interesting. You see if Google becomes just a catalog, sort of like SkyMall "Magazine" in airplane seats, then it risks losing all of its unique utility. I'm certain that Microsoft can construct an equally compelling catalog as can Yahoo. This will shape the future for them.

I performed your experiment and it didn't seem to match your conclusions.

My search was: jwt web toolkit

The search page itself had no Google ads on it.

The top link was the homepage for the toolkit project. There were no ad links on the page.

The second and third links were for wikipedia, which contained no Google ads.

The fourth link did have Google ads on it. The fifth and sixth lengths did not. The seventh link did.

I tried again with a different set of search terms: neutron spin echo

The top of the page did contain a link to Google Scholar, followed by three links to pay walled articles. I am not aware of any profit agreement between Google and the publishers, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that it's there.

The remaining links were either to pages containing no advertising (Google or otherwise) or to more pay walled articles. Short of Google have a relationship with the publishers, Google again made no money on this search.

For the record, I don't have an ad-blocker turned on, so I would see ads if they were there.

"jwt web toolkit" and "neutron spin echo" are your best examples of results that might contain ads?

How about "playstation 4" for example?

I get one ad there. The first organic result is the Sony homepage. The second is the wikipedia page.

Seems pretty reasonable.

Those weren't my best examples of pages that might contain ads. They were my last two Google searches. If was I looking for ads, I'd probably search of acai berry or something similar. However, I had understood the original complain to be that you're assaulted with Google ads on all searches, not just the ones where you're intentionally looking for ads.

I guess the main place where I was unfair to the parent was his comment that not recognizing his comment that:

>There is no longer a big push for 'finding things on the web' which was the appeal of early search engines, now the bulk of the web use search as their portal to a giant reference library and product catalog.

I do use it as a reference library, but almost never as a product catalog. I imagine that, if I used Google to search for things to buy, there would be far more ads, but that forms a negligible part of my internet usage.

You really took an extreme here. Those queries are so far from the mainstream that the fact that you don't see ads for those keywords doesn't invalidate your parent. Think outside of those niche queries to realize what a more traditional user sees.

A query like "LA Car Rental" will give you an idea of what the parent post describes.

If you want to stick closer to the tech niche, try "build iphone app". Even the query "java profiler" gets me four ads on the page.

What should the SERP for "LA Car Rental" contain? If that's all you typed, what is Google to suppose you want?

Assuming you don't actually want to rent a car in Los Angeles (or maybe if you do), you will get much more entertaining results by adding a little qualification, e.g., "LA Car Rental scams".

I do not disagree with those statements, but your comment somehow comes across as unnecessarily contradictory. I was just showing that there are ads on the pages. I did not take any stance regarding what those pages should contain.

Hm, I'm divided on this. The more shallow population got addicted to the Internet and the search results represent that. I don't think it's a problem of Google search results. It's more a herd mentality. Geeks not excluded (hey look, it's shiny! - what, useful?).

On the other hand, Google also provides much more value in search than before. When I travel to a city I can go to Google maps and visualize my destination and find a hotel near by. Navigation is useful, we are perfecting it since thousands of years and Google is really good at it.

As for advertising, it has it's place (like when I'm traveling) and somehow Google got good at showing it to me when I need it.

It's sad that they are the only player to provide this kind of value from a backup perspective, but I don't see a credible alternative to them. And they do contribute back to the community, so I can't even fault them in that respect.

Now maybe there is a point that advertisement is a kind of manipulation and they are brain washing you plus spying on your every move. But if there is one thing I learned it's that nobody cares what you want to say. Algorithms don't frighten me for every day searches (you want to know I search for Ubuntu and Python 3? be my guest!).

I also use add-block and intuitively ignore the highlighted search results in (which sometimes confuses me, as the thing I search is in there). I hate ads for stuff I don't care about or even dislike and add-block is good with that.

Maybe that's why they are so successful, they computed what to show me when I'm looking for it and keep the crap away otherwise..

You should watch this Ted Talk: Privacy matters. It might change your mind a little on the data mining bit.

http://www.ted.com/talks/alessandro_acquisti_why_privacy_mat...

> I think it was a smart move on their part from the shareholder perspective (disclosure I sold all my Google stock at $650 :-(). The second order effects though will be interesting. You see if Google becomes just a catalog, sort of like SkyMall "Magazine" in airplane seats, then it risks losing all of its unique utility.

I think the main thing is whether Google can monetize the relevant results, without letting in the irrelevant ones.

I work for an online retailer, and we pretty much show up in all the places we always have, except that now we are paying for more of those spots. Some of our organic search results have fallen off a bit as Google emphasizes larger brand names, but I imagine they'll pick up via their Trusted Stores initiative or whatever the next monetization scheme is.

>When a buying intent is detected the 'shopping' bar activates which only shows shopping results from people who advertise on Google

From the end user side this one is particularly frustrating. Google Shopping has gone from being an incredibly valuable tool when I was looking to make a purchase to being practically worthless. I don't even bother with it anymore.

That, and Google have been introducing more services into the results page (flight shopping comparison, for example).

You can see an article by Danny Sullivan from this summer here: http://searchengineland.com/google-results-too-ad-heavy-1662...

And this is great breakdown of the various types of results Google is providing these days: http://moz.com/blog/mega-serp-a-visual-guide-to-google

Purely anecdotal here, but when I search Google on my mobile browser I'm only seeing 1 or 2 results per page. I've pretty much given up using it on my phone now.

Which search engine do you use in its place?

I don't.

I usually go find my laptop.