Comment by victoriasun

I was an Ads PM at Google several years ago. While there are many reasons I personally disliked working there, how Google handles the ethical concern of advertising and Search is not one of them. Google cares about being Search first. Ads are seen as a happy side effect of being able to fully and correctly answer a user's question. Search is often used with commercial intent, after all. One piece of thing most people don't realise is that showing an ad doesn't make Google money. In fact, showing an ad that doesn't convert into a purchase can often lose Google money by depressing the value of an impression. So Google invests a lot in the "targeted" part of the advertising, and making sure that the ad actually provides value.