[xyzelement]

// To sell your competitor's name is wholly uncompetitive

I don’t know where this came from. If I am googling Cancun it’s the perfect time to show me an ad for less famous destination I never heard of but might end up going to.

If I had somehow never heard of Toyota, telling me it exists when I am looking up Honda is perfect.

I get that there are plenty of times where this is annoying but there are also plenty of times where this unlocks awareness that helps a consumer.

[echelon]

Search became the only way to access platforms and sales channels.

Google is the gatekeeper of search. (Just as an app store is the gatekeeper of software on a mobile platform.)

Google gets to tax every inquiry into your product, even those with direct sales intent.

If you put people on a bell curve distribution, some non-negligible percentage will always click on the first link. Google taxes all of this.

[jfoster]

It depends on how it's done, doesn't it?

If it's presented as a relevant result, it doesn't seem so good. If it's presented as "you might also be interested in" then it seems better.

[RhodesianHunter]

What bothers me is when I Google "Pepsi" and item #1 is a Pepsi ad, item #2 is Pepsi's website.

It's obvious what I wanted, neither I nor Pepsi are happy about that ad being there...

[easton]

Freakonomics had a episode one time about this very thing (and some other stuff in online advertising), using eBay as a case study. They were buying ads on the term "eBay". Presumably Pepsi is doing the same thing.