Maybe the idea is to encourage Panasonic to pay Google to get their result on the first page.
Maybe ten or fifteen years in the future, paying to Google (or Facebook, or...) will be the only way to have your web page delivered to anyone.
I mean, why should Google display your page to anyone for free, if someone else is willing to pay to have their page displayed instead. It's not like people are going to switch en masse to something else, just because Google results become slightly less relevant. And when paying becomes the new normal (e.g. it will become normal to pay to have Hacker News on the first page for "Hacker News"), the results will return to be more relevant again.
For certain niches, this is already happening. Pretty much every web hosting company nowadays run ad campaigns for their own brand, because other companies kept advertising on those keywords, and the only way to put their own web site up top is to outbid the competitor.
Maybe ten or fifteen years in the future, paying to Google (or Facebook, or...) will be the only way to have your web page delivered to anyone.
I mean, why should Google display your page to anyone for free, if someone else is willing to pay to have their page displayed instead. It's not like people are going to switch en masse to something else, just because Google results become slightly less relevant. And when paying becomes the new normal (e.g. it will become normal to pay to have Hacker News on the first page for "Hacker News"), the results will return to be more relevant again.