> On my 26" display I have almost never seen ads taking up all the space

It depends what you search for. If you search for something Google can monetize, like this search for sofas

http://i.imgur.com/KAZ6zuq.jpg

then little room is left for "normal" results. But if you search for something non-monetizable, of course less ads will show up.

The organic results are a list of sofa vendors, each with pretty boring text descriptions like "we offer great sofas at great prices and with up to 4 years interest free credit available, there has never been a better time to buy! ‎Fabric Sofas - ‎Famous Brands - ‎Leather Sofas - ‎Carpets". Similarly on Bing and DDG. There is not much to choose between them.

A page full of blah blah sofas is not very helpful if I'm looking to buy a sofa.

To me it seems actually more useful (and attractive) to show photos, prices and filters in the "Shopping" results seem actually much more attractive and useful, or a map, or some kind of ratings.

That's the thing I've never gotten about many of the examples of 'zomg-too-many-ads' they're mostly searches that you'd normally be looking to buy an item off of.

On a side note I don't actually get the map results most of the time anymore. Guess I'm in a separate test group.

the point is google should be showing me good results, not just what I can find in the yellow pages.

You have a yellow pages?

Touche. But yes I do. They make excellent sources for paper for camp fires

It wouldn't surprise me if most of the people who do a search for "sofas" want to browse shopping websites for sofas. The naturally monetizable searches are going to be searches that users don't mind being monetized.

Google probably has teams full of people figuring out that sort of thing. The problem with maximizing revenue is it annoys people, so if you can figure out how to selectively maximize revenue when it doesn't annoy people...

Then why not show the best shopping websites, rather than ads for shopping websites?

The first result is Amazon.com. Its not an ad. The next ones are local listings. And don't think they are also ads. Those are search results.

And I think Google did a good job here as most purchases for heavy items like Sofas will be made locally.

The first result shown is sofaulove.com, not amazon. It is an ad. The only actual search result is amazon, which comes 4th on the page.

currently their local listings are pretty shit. Theyre worse than what I can find in the yellow pages actually. Search for honda motorcyle repair in bellevue, wa for example. none of the top results are for that. but car dealers eat right into the results.

Very strange: can't get Google to show me ads at all no matter what I type, like "sofas" or "erectile dysfunction" which should trigger a bunch of ads. Perhaps ads pushed consider geographic location?

I live in Japan and "sofa" brings no advertisement, but "ソファー" brings three. So I guess it does indeed consider geographic location.

Wow! That makes sense. Sure enough, searching for "沙发" brings up three ads for the PRC market. Here I was thinking that Google scaled back their advertisements significantly, they are just more precisely targetted :)

Are you using Adblock?

In Chrome? I don't think so. I see no ads from Google at all, even if I try very hard. I am in the PRC market, which might have something to do with it, but even Bing will serve me ads if I switch to Bing.com.

Is there just one normal result there on that entire screen? Ouch.

How many people typing [ sofa ] want generic information about sofas, compared to people buying sofas. The keyword drips ads.

Do you want the product that is considered the best value, the product that is the most popular? or do you want the product that the retailers are willing to pay the most to get you to buy?

Google (well, I shouldn't pick on google. All brokers of advertising) optimize to push you towards the product that their customers are willing to pay the highest ad rates for.

Of course, In a company concerned with it's long-term reputation, googlers will point out, this is modulated by a knowledge that they need annoy the customer less than any alternative.

My point is that an ad is always going to cause the broker to have a conflict between what the user needs and what the customer is willing to pay for, while an organic search result (unless it competes with an ad, which it often does) does not cause that conflict for the ad broker.

Then you'd search for "sofa with best value" and "most popular sofa". And lo and behold, the results look quite different.

Are you disagreeing with my assertion that there is a conflict of interest between the consumer and the advertiser?

Your assertion would be better phrased as a conflict between short term and long term interests of the advertiser. That is, the short term interest of making money at the expense of the long term interest in retaining users. In the long term, consumers and advertisers interests are aligned: consumers want the best service they can find and advertisers want to give it to them.

>consumers and advertisers interests are aligned: consumers want the best service they can find and advertisers want to give it to them.

Huh? Advertisers want to make as much money as possible. Consumers want to pay as little as possible for the best goods.

This is a fundamental conflict for a company that has no way to add value for the consumer.

First? google only displays ads from companies that pay them for ads. Next? they order those ads by how much money they can make from those ads.

Do you really think that how much a company is willing to pay to get a consumer to see an ad has anything to do with how good of a deal that product is? If anything, the relationship is going to be inverse. I'll pay you more for a high-margin customer than a low-margin customer.

Only one normal, but the maps and shopping that take up most of the space are still organic results, and probably more useful than the 'normal' ones.

There is no inherent conflict of interest between consumer and advertiser. There are conflicts of interest a between some consumers and advertisers. That is the point -- web search monetization is more complex than "ZOMG too many ads"

It's because the query is terrible. I mean, do you want to see pictures of sofas, buy one or what?

Above the fold on my 26" screen http://i.imgur.com/yXya3MI.png . As you can see 0 blue links!