>Now there's absolutely no reason to believe that Google or HP care if your friends got the best computer for their money, Google wants their ad money and HP is in the business of selling computers at margins as high as they can.
You seem to be convinced that all business is just one big scam. I wonder what you do for a living?
>Why isn't Google letting your friends see the websites you ranked but only ads? To make them more likely to click on ads.
Well I certainly think they wouldn't add this feature had they thought it will drive down the click rate but immediately approaching this as if it were a conspiracy to get some extra clicks while users figure it's a scam is just that, a conspiracy. In the long run it just doesn't make sense for google to display results that are not relevant to visitors and they know that.
Really? Have you seen Google's search results lately? You have to scroll quite a bit to see organic results, and they have done quite a bit so users mistake ads for content. That's one big scam and it coincided with (IMO) another scam, major penalties on websites to cut their unpaid traffic.
I don't care for what Google says, I look at what it does. You should too:
I've seen Google's search results and I think they are very relevant and are getting more relevant all the time. Frankly I think they do just enough to distinguish what are ads and what are search results. The reason most visitors can't tell the difference is because they don't care to learn the difference and they are accustomed to get what they want when they click on the first result. What do you reasonably expect them to do? Popup a message that says "this is an ad, are you sure you want to click on this link"?
>major penalties on websites to cut their unpaid traffic.
That is just a conspiracy theory on your part. Maybe you are butt-hurt that your site is not ranked how you would have liked. I worked in SEO for a few years and I've seen Google time and time again improve the results and weed out the scammy and "made for google" sites with real relevant content. How many sites are there that sell HD monitors? Thousands? Not all of them can be included in the top 10 results and I guarantee you that each one of them truly believes that their site deserves a spot on the top 10. Well guess what? Not all of them can be right.
You seem to be convinced that all business is just one big scam. I wonder what you do for a living?
>Why isn't Google letting your friends see the websites you ranked but only ads? To make them more likely to click on ads.
Well I certainly think they wouldn't add this feature had they thought it will drive down the click rate but immediately approaching this as if it were a conspiracy to get some extra clicks while users figure it's a scam is just that, a conspiracy. In the long run it just doesn't make sense for google to display results that are not relevant to visitors and they know that.