Ironically, I view the paid placements atop Google's SERPs as legitimate search results. I find myself doing Google searches just to click on the ads and see what kinds of products my web-enabled colleagues are explicitly advertising to people with my needs.
And I don't think it's at all foolish that people subconsciously believe that those highlighted results at the top of SERPs are "the high-quality results". They often are! They lead directly to well-designed product pages that tell you just what you are looking for and that have refreshingly direct BUY NOW buttons.
Whereas the top non-paid search results are, as often as not, either duplicates of the paid content at the top (by no coincidence, companies with great SEO often know about AdWords as well) or passive-aggressive advertisements-in-disguise. (Give me a straight sales pitch instead of all that tiptoeing around.)
Google is basically the equivalent of all those trade magazines: If you're in the optics business and you need to know who sells lenses, you subscribe to Laser Focus World specifically for the ads and the product reviews. Or the local alternative newsweekly: I leaf through those to look for new restaurants or clubs. Or a coupon book. I can afford to laugh at coupon books, but people do read and use those things.
Ok sure if Google is now supposed to be the equivalent of an ad-stuffed trade magazine or a coupon book then yeah, I can't disagree.
To bad though, remember when it used to be a pretty good Search Engine?
Seriously, if that's what Google wants to be, or apparently is, then that's fine I'll just not go there anymore since 99% of the time I'm looking for information, you know, researching things on the Internet, not trade magazine ads or coupons.
(actually personally it's not the ads but the fact that their real search results have been increasingly inaccurate over the past few months, that I'm actually starting to use other SEs like DuckDuckGo and Yandex as my first choice, more often. That DDG doesn't have sponsored results and makes user privacy a priority is a nice bonus)
And I don't think it's at all foolish that people subconsciously believe that those highlighted results at the top of SERPs are "the high-quality results". They often are! They lead directly to well-designed product pages that tell you just what you are looking for and that have refreshingly direct BUY NOW buttons.
Whereas the top non-paid search results are, as often as not, either duplicates of the paid content at the top (by no coincidence, companies with great SEO often know about AdWords as well) or passive-aggressive advertisements-in-disguise. (Give me a straight sales pitch instead of all that tiptoeing around.)
Google is basically the equivalent of all those trade magazines: If you're in the optics business and you need to know who sells lenses, you subscribe to Laser Focus World specifically for the ads and the product reviews. Or the local alternative newsweekly: I leaf through those to look for new restaurants or clubs. Or a coupon book. I can afford to laugh at coupon books, but people do read and use those things.