[illiarian]

> When it says "sponsored" in bold text, prominently displayed right at the top of the result, you know it's an ad.

Prominently? Bold text?

Here's how they repeatedly made ads indistinguishable from search results: https://atechnocratblog.wordpress.com/2016/07/26/color-fade-...

Or this: https://twitter.com/garybernhardt/status/1648496387640938496

To quote from the above, here's what they said in the beginning: "we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers"

[kkkkkkk]

The tweet you linked was from an outage that lasted 30 minutes, it's pretty disingenuous of you to try and pass that off as status quo.

I do agree however that the labeling has gotten less prominent over time. I don't however agree that it has become subtle enough to considered indistinguishable from search results.

[illiarian]

> I don't however agree that it has become subtle enough to considered indistinguishable from search results.

This is what it looks like on mobile. A tiny "sponsored" text is the only thing that distinguishes ads from search results: https://imgur.com/a/WOk4NdR

It's deliberately designed this way compared to what it once was https://atechnocratblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/history-...

To deny this is quite bizarre