[stackghost]

>I have never seen a helpful ad in google search

I have never seen a helpful ad, anywhere, in my life.

"Ads help people discover new products" is a lie that people who work for companies supported by advertising revenue tell themselves. If $deity exists, and they were to delete all ads from the world tomorrow, never to return, everything would be just fine.

Truly great products sell themselves by word of mouth.

[wraptile]

I agree, maybe "ads are useful" could have been true long time ago before the world was not as connected.

You could maybe argue that ad revenue could subsidize the costs of information delivery but information delivery costs are basically non existent today - it's all about attention delivery and thats an entirely different thing.