[orijing]

Of course that's the point. Again, I was responding to the parent ("Google should simply deliver the best results, no matter what algorithm they use to do so"), which I understood to be what results Google should choose to show. Perhaps I misunderstood his meaning for "best", but "best" in this context to me means the result that's most likely to satisfy the user.

I'm not disagreeing with the fact that ads are subject to a whole different objective function. I'm saying that if the best results were already in the organic, then the ads would either be redundant (for the user) or otherwise less useful than the organic (by definition, really).

[zem]

yep, i was just pointing out that the ads being less useful than the organic result was pretty much by definition.