if you know the history of search engines and search based ads, you’ll know that they used to be seeded into the search results as results. Google was one of the key players that championed moving away from poisoned search results and keeping ads in their own area and clearly marking them as ads not search results. Poisoned search results is an industry term for a thing that google helped end.
That’s cool, but the industry has always run on ad revenue since its inception, since long before google was a player. I hope they consider offering a pay for an ad free experience at some point.
the core of their industry is to sell ads, providing us with search results provides them with human eyes which is their product. we are not their customers, we are their product. google doesn’t vet any ads for validity of claim, that would be an impossible endless task.
most people who use the internet regularly have learned to reflexively completely ignore the ads. no regular user would be fooled into thinking they are actual results. sure, some people will be taken in by the ads, which is the entire point of ads. people are allowed to advertise for all sorts of things i don’t agree with, that is part of being in a free country with free speech.
but that has much greater issues with equality, bias, and is an impossible task with the nature and size of the internet.
algorithms are not arbitrary nor objective, rather they are crafted with a specific objective and can be evaluated and refined against said objective. Almost all systems are susceptible to being gamed, even the human ones you are proposing. Algorithms are at least a known, quantifiable, examinable, autiable, refinable thing…as well as essential for every single aspect of modern life, none of which could exist without them.
