Just googled that to see if the ads are helpful. They weren't. Not surprising, because Google ads are ranked by profitability, not helpfulness, and those metrics don't correlate as much as Google would like you to think. The ads just took my attention away from organic results, which are the ones that are supposed to be ranked by helpfulness.
Those sneaker ads probably aren't destroying our democracy[1], they're just costing the society things that are hard to quantify. They induce me to buy what's most profitable to the sellers, not what's best for me. They take away business from actually helpful resources, and from those who don't advertise on Google.
[1] They are enabling the existence of a search monopoly (along with other factors), so you know, "probably" is the strongest word I'd go with here.
No, Google Ads are not ranked for highest bidder. There's Quality Score that affects the decision a lot. If I have a website about running shoes and want to bid on the keyword "second hand cars" two things happen: first my bid gets astronomically high, because it's not matching the user's intent. secondly from all those people who click and leave google search but come back after a few seconds, google figures out that the quality score of the website is so bad (wrong intent) that the bid for that advertiser even gets more astronomically high and at one point even gets stopped.
The whole system incentivises ads that match the intent of the user, any deviation from this is extremely difficult and not profitable for the advertiser in most cases.
I know. I didn't say the ads were ranked for highest bidder. I said they were ranked to maximize profitability. If the user does not click an ad, it's not profitable to Google. If the user comes back to the search page after visiting the ad, the ad is not profitable to the advertiser.
But if the user buys from the ad, that doesn't say anything about whether the ad was useful (or counter-productive) to the user, it only means that this transaction was profitable to Google and the advertiser.
Ads not matching the search query are not the issue. They are neither profitable nor helpful, so you can't use that criterion to distinguish the two goals.
Those sneaker ads probably aren't destroying our democracy[1], they're just costing the society things that are hard to quantify. They induce me to buy what's most profitable to the sellers, not what's best for me. They take away business from actually helpful resources, and from those who don't advertise on Google.
[1] They are enabling the existence of a search monopoly (along with other factors), so you know, "probably" is the strongest word I'd go with here.