[lolinder]

It's mostly an academic exercise since paid search will always be small, but I think both ads and SEO are at fault here.

Google profits from ad impressions and ad clicks. That is what they're incentivized to maximize, which means that for Google the ideal mix of search results is a few high quality ads on top of a lot of pages that are loaded with Google advertising. Far from having an adversarial relationship with SEO content farms, Google is symbiotic with them: the more time people spend on the content farms, the more ad impressions Google gets to sell. If the content farm doesn't actually answer the user's query and they return to Google for another round of first party ads, all the better.

They only need to provide relevant enough searches to keep people from trying a different search engine, which as we've seen isn't difficult.