Social media sites offer the ability for everyone on platforms to pay for primary placement now. This is a big conflict of interest in how posts are shown to users, and why very protected/secret algorithms are now applied to creatively show posts to some users and not others on all of these sites and services.

Once a company like Google has cornered the search market,and they also have tentacles everywhere through their collected data form other sources (e.g. google maps, gmail, google trends, Android, etc) there are few ways of backing out. They are now deeply ingrained in our society, and they'll know about anyone who is inventing an alternate path before it even happens and possibly operate in an anti-competitive manner. This is the modern realization of Skynet in a way I guess. :/

At the end of the day, how can we trust companies that manipulate us to boost profits? We simply can't, and we shouldn't really allow monopolies to get this big and embedded into critical services.

Google's ads make good money because:

(1) The overture model for running a search ad market works well (Google acquired and adopted a mature system). (2) targeted ad markets get better with scale. The larger the market share, the smaller a& more targeted a segment is. (3) Ads are also search results. Over time, Google has nudged users to select ads... on high value searches.

On that last point: The value of a click varies in orders of magnitude 18c for this one $12 for that one. In the early days, this meant you could buy clicks for pennies. These days, Google limits the supply of low value ads and increases the supply of low value ad clickers.

On average, users might even see or click on fewer ads than 10 years ago. On high value search terms, advertising prominence & click-throughs are through the roof.

If Google is "playing dirty," this is where the incentive is highest... and achieves the goals which Google has strategically used to grow revenue for years now.

Playing dirty is even a weird term here. A newspaper may have a journalistic ethos whereby ad-selling squares don't get to editorialise journalism... whether they stick to it or not. By what ethos is Google not supposed to let ad selling concerns influence organic search?

This is about incrementality. Google/advertisers are well aware of this fact and have been doing lots of ablation studies to understand advertisement's effectiveness. Don't underestimate the industry; you may spend millions of dollars but not billions of dollars without good justifications.

I don't know the exact numbers (and I wouldn't be able to tell it even if I know it) and it heavily depends on the type of particular ads (e.g. brand ads will show much less incrementality), but the general consensus is that more than half of those ads can take the credit for conversions. Given that conversion tracking and attribution is not perfect, it's fair to take the money.

This generates revenue for Google with virtually no added value.

Did anyone besides Google sales and marketing people actually believe that?

Because if you don’t, a competitor will and that is where the article takes the turn into talking about the new layout, occlusion, etc. It’s an interesting discussion about trust and how far Google can push before that trust is broken. However, I’m almost certain I’ve had this conversation a decade ago.

At least for my company, we run blackout experiments and measure/estimate the incrementality of the ads.

The price of AdWords has certainly gone up, but the value hasn't declined.