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> Google’s primary business is search. They monetize search in a couple different ways. The primary revenue model for search is micro auctions to determine ranking of product placement on search results.

You're going to have to explain how product placement in search isn't ads.

I worked at Yahoo! Travel in the before times, so hello from a fellow Travel industry person, I've got a Travelocity gnome in my stuff from work area. :) We had lots of advertising on our pages too, but it was always clearly marked (for some value of clearly); Yahoo! had done some pay for search ranking deals long before I joined, but they were clearly frowned upon by the time I was there; organic results had to be organic, although certainly if an advertiser is pushing a hotel that's going to get traffic which could boost rankings (I don't think Y! Travel included traffic in hotel rankings, but we didn't have a super thorough data pipeline)

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/030416/googles... and https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/18/how-does-google-make-money-a... (first results I could find) both say 80% of Alphabet’s revenue comes from Google ads; unless you have numbers to say otherwise, I think it's pretty reasonable to call that their primary business

> Search is Google’s most lucrative unit. In 2020, the company generated $104 billion in “search and other” revenues, making up 71% of Google’s ad revenue and 57% of Alphabet’s total revenue.

From your second source. I guess you were conflating ad revenue to online advertisements. Its all ad revenue, but its not all online advertisements.

Your point is completely unclear. The vast majority of Google's money is coming from selling advertising. The have multiple ways of selling advertising - advertising on Google Search itself, advertising on other people's pages, advertising in YouTube videos etc. But it's ultimately all money from advertising.

> The primary revenue model for search is micro auctions to determine ranking of product placement on search results.

Google monetizes search with ads. The micro auctions are for those ads. They even say "Ad" on each of them.

If you have evidence that they're doing paid placement in the actual search results, I'd love to see it.

FWIW, I do wish Google's ads were more obviously visually distinct from search results (and fewer in number).

They don't have to do paid placement. They know which sites are running their ads and can prioritize them to maximize impressions based on their pervasive tracking.

> Google monetizes search with ads.

Google monetizes search but not with Google ads. This is the primary distinguisher. Its an auction selling space on page for a supplier to provide their own textual content. Google's online advertisement businesses don't sell space on Google pages, but online ad products for other peoples' pages.

Google considers all of this as ad revenue, but distinguishes search from their advertisement products in their revenue filings.

I don't understand what you are getting at. In both your comments, it sounds like you find the most convoluted way to describe "Ads", and then claim that because you didn't use the word "Ad" in your comment, we should pretend that what you described is something completely different (but totally not ads?)

Google distinguishes ads on their own properties from ads on other properties in their revenue filings, but they still call this ad revenue.

Google Search ads are bucketed under "Google Search & other" in financial statements, which is just one of their "Avertising revenue" categories as defined here: https://abc.xyz/investor/other/additional-financial-informat...

>Its an auction selling space on page for a supplier to provide their own textual content.

So... an ad.

"A rose by any other name" and such.

> Its an auction selling space on page for a supplier to provide their own textual content.

Are you referring to the things that say "Ad" next to them on Google's search result pages? If so... those are ads.

>auction selling space on page for a supplier to provide their own textual content

This is an ad.

Several Google ad products involve serving the same ad on Search as well on other people's pages.

> Google does make money from ads, but that is not their primary business.

Per their 10K, ads are >80% of their revenue.

I'm sorry, carry on.

> Ads aren’t worth very much. Google ads generate [...] maybe fractions of a penny.

Suppose someone types "hotel Paris" into a search engine. Then the ads auction is the search engine turning around and saying "here's someone that's (probably) about to spend a thousand euros on _some_ website. How much if I send them to yours?" You can't buy that kind of intent-to-buy for only pennies -- that's 2-3 orders of magnitude off.

There's definitely ads that are sold by the kilo-impressions, but search ads generally do not fall in that category.

Disclosure: I work for Google, but have no relevant inside information. A public resource for this is https://brandastic.com/blog/how-much-do-google-ads-cost/:

> In 2022, the average Google AdWords cost per click is about $1 to $2 on the Google Search network. Some newer niches may still see lower costs, while more established businesses, might see higher cost-per-click averages.

> Google’s search results are independent of Google’s advertising programs.

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/1722080?hl=en