You may not like the ads, but they pay for the product.
Please don't think the audience here on HN is naïve enough to believe rhetoric like "Search is the product." It isn't, and it never has been. The product is the ads; they pay for the mechanisms that display the ads, whether that's search, YouTube, GMail, or whatever. Those things are undoubtedly useful services, but the product Google makes is ads. Everything else is marketing.
Please don't think the audience here on HN is naïve enough to believe rhetoric like "Search is the product." It isn't, and it never has been. The product is the ads; they pay for the mechanisms that display the ads, whether that's search, YouTube, GMail, or whatever. Those things are undoubtedly useful services, but the product Google makes is ads. Everything else is marketing.