They have no competition to care anymore. Their closest competitor, Bing, has a 2.24% market share which consists mostly of people who don't bother to change their default browser's default search engine. Competition is necessary to breed innovation. See for example, IE6.
I’ve always wondered if Google AdWords hurts your SEO. Let’s say you sell widgets and searching for widgets you are ranked 5. You buy AdWords to be on the top. Since people click you AdWords ad that’s on top, they are less likely to click the organic listing thus penalizing your organic listing since it’s not getting clicks. Google factors in which organic listing click counts when determining ranking since it is a strong signal.
Most companies will buy Google Ads (formerly Adwords) as insurance for their SEO efforts. At the barest minimum, you don't want links to competitor sites at the top of the search results. With ads, you can at least claim the top spot for those search keywords.
Most people don't click on ads, so getting visitors to your site from organic search terms is more likely to convert them into returning users.
Yes they would have. OMG that was 10 years ago and ...what is new in Google search these last 10 years. Maybe a lot but I don't see it. I just see ads and, when I do some long tail query most of the results are just random sites in russia or whatever with keyword salad (is there a word for that kind of site?)
