[hnmcs]

But of course.

Yet I can see the other side of the coin -- that they are right to downrank others for this (or at least: that it is a useful heuristic for judging other websites), even while at the same time they are right to frontload ads on their own results pages. Their best research probably suggests they should lay it out this way, as has been said elsewhere in the discussion.

Nevertheless, I personally downranked Google Search about 6 years ago, when I could see how far it was already from any idealized concept I had of it, as a (reliable, objective) library-style index search program for internet pages, which would just report back things honestly, like a database query.