[LaundroMat]

That's exactly what Brin and Page said in the paper where they presented Google...

"[W]e expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers"

and

"[W]e believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm."

Both from The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page (1998)

[dmvdoug]

have they ever addressed this in later years? Like, what was their justification for Google becoming the AdMonster it did?

[Quekid5]

They're now richer than god. Why would they care about anything other than money? Societal rules don't affect them very much at this point.

[liveoneggs]

Yes but you can't hear them because they are on yachts

[dmvdoug]

Sounds like a job for the orcas…

[Quekid5]

Lol, hope springs eternal :).

... but more seriously: Yeah, their reasoning (now) isn't exactly going to be unbiased and/or unblemished by their own experience. They probably have the most extreme survivorship bias ever. (Not their fault, they just do because of whatever factors got them into the position they're in.)