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Google Allows Sponsored Rankings...In Ads
A number of written that the sky is fallen because Google is allowing sponsored rankings. Of course, if you read the article it's the sponsored links on the right side of the page - where the ads have always been.
Its all about cost/benefit analysis...
The last time I checked, google is allowed to make a profit. Google is also allowed to fail miserably if the customers don't like it.
Goes right back to the free market world, and costs.
So if "the cost" of trying to find something on the net gets too high on google, then google will be forced to find another source of revenue when their customers leave.
Simple as that. The market is a harsh place. If we love our google, we have to pay for it. Otherwise, no money means no google. So you have to scroll down the page. Well, that is a cost of freeloading. Ask the people who used to pay for Lexis/Nexis (sp?) what solid, usable information costs.
Even abcnews.go.com has banners before you get to the news. It is coming. Really, it is a minor annoyance, and not much more IMHO. I certainly won't stop using google. I hope the make all the money in the world, they serve a real purpose on the net.
Actually, it's even better than you describe it. The highest paying customers are probably shown first. However, they also factor in how good the pages are (as judged by how many people click-through the links), so the most popular pages are shown first, even over money. Therefore, if I search for a product name: say, purify (a program to check C code dynamically), and there are 10 people who have paid more than that company to sell products branded purify that are not at all what I or anyone else want (spam spam spam spam), it still won't show up.
They've instituted a safeguard so not only is spamming not useful, it's barely an option. The items that people are most often interested in are the ones that you'll see most prominently.
Go Google!
What's interesting about this post not what the article claims to be about. The article, running on an Excite web site, is fairly clearly written deceptively to make Google look bad. It throws in what amounts to an ad for these ridiculous Overture people.
A quick google search on "Excite Overture" leads to an article about how Overture is the company that runs paid ads on the Excite search engine.
So this story is not about how some people are stupid and think google is shady, but about how some people at Excite apparently are both stupid and shady.
CSS 2 Selectors provide enough power to nuke most banner adverts, and, if you're clever enough, remove these text ads.
CSS 3 Selectors should be even better, and let you do it on a per-website basis, which might be useful if your rules to nuke Google ads are too general to apply to all sites.
You will need a browser that impliments them, though; Opera and Mozilla support most CSS 2 selector syntax, but IE6 does not.
You can use the same techniques to override ugly colour schemes, change font styles and sizes and even include content. Just define it all in a user stylesheet; that's what it's there for.
I might revive my banner killing user CSS actually, it worked quite well.. but I don't think I'll bother with Google :)