Even in India, the PPC results can be found at the bottom of the SERP. So, perhaps it is seeping through to everywhere, who knows?

Yap, indeed and not only with the amount of displayed entries but also by CTR-strong verticals.

We realize that and that is precisely why we’re working hard on main ads seamlessly blend with the organic results. Most of the time though, ads are far below ads as we follow ads with images, local, news and especially products. Considering that we can check the quality sites of our advertisers we feel more confident about your satisfaction when you click on ads.

Merry Christmas to the SEO community and expect new major changes in January and especially for Panda’s anniversary.

Organic and PPC dovetail perfectly with eachother. I understand Google may test different variations in number of listings. That’s probably a good idea on their part. I suspect at the end of the day there will be a balance or close balance between Adwords and organic listings.

It’s all conjecture I agree. But, all SEO were based on these conjectures. Some worked, others didn’t. It’s just a matter of picking the ones that proved correct. As to this post’s subject, my ‘conjecture’ is Google indeed is heading that way. Paid ads will dominate and soon all organic search results will be relegated to the 2nd or 3rd pages. That way, Google gets more advertisers and thus, more revenue.

Not providing the most relevant results would threaten the core of their business – which isn’t advertisers, but the surfers who visit to search. Without them, there is no business. While the big “G” has held the top spot for some time now, it’s not like visitors don’t have a credible search alternative in Bing. I’m sure Google knows that if they alienate their viewers, they can watch their business spiral down the drain.

So I expect the move to more paid listings to proceed cautiously indeed – same with the precedence given to sites affiliated with Google. As long as those sites really do fill the needs of a searcher performing a keyword search, it’s unlikely to cause any problems for the big G.

1 result was the images, you could say related searches was another. Really there are 9 results here instead of 8, not that far off IMO. Still I agree with everyone about the PPC comments.

You need to read the book “The Google Story”. It explains how Google’s advertising model was developed purposely to be completely different from Yahoo, AOL etc. And let’s face it, their model has stood the test of time and Yahoo and AOL only continue to decline. Google isn’t stupid. They know too many/too obvious ads will drive people away. And Google’s ads are useful, quality, relevant ads. Searchers’ quality remains the same, it’s the sites that don’t have the budget for PPC that are screwed by this.

If Google keeps going over board with lousy search results thus purposely pointing searchers to ads then folks will catch on to that fairly quick and STOP using it becasue they know the results are not real like the USED to be.

Facebook favors Bing (don’t have to say what a powerhouse FB is – once they go public, Google shareholders will sell to buy FB stock, mmmmmaybe?) and if Google keeps on over-doing it like this they will end up on an episode of “American Greed” with Stacy Keach!