Google keeps ranking changes completely siloed from the ad side of the company, and the decision makers about ranking changes don't see statistics about how it might effect ads. We don't even have a way of collecting that data. (At least as far as I've ever seen.)
Correct me if I'm wrong; When I'm searching for (unquoted) "Canadian equivalent to SOPA Bill". I'm getting results about Soap, Telenovela, Spas, Dishwasher Soap, TV shows (and 1 related hit). The result, as you mentioned, could be ranked independent of Ads, but the Ad spectrum is wider (Soaps, Spas, Soap operas, TV shows, etc...) [I'm not getting any in this particular case].
If it's restrictive search (quoting each word - sigh!), the search result quality is slightly better (first 3 hits), but the potential of Ads is also low.
I know you put the user first - but wouldn't you speculate in my case?
There's another possibility which is that the ads are the query and the search query is in fact their match result. In that case, adding or removing quotes within the search query might not have any impact on the ads being shown.
Don't know which way it works, but it seems to me the latter would be better for showing ads without having any negative impact on search results.
www.google.com/#hl=en&q=san+francisco+restaurant+reviews www.google.com/#hl=en&q=hollywood+cauldron
-when i previously used google for retail reviews I would just bypass all of your results to get to yelp. sometimes trip advisor.
-look at those youtube video results for the 2nd query. So off the mark, but you guys keep them in there because it is good for google. it doesn't help your users and makes you look bad. I don't know what you guys are thinking.
I use Bing for 95% of my searches now. For tech searches I still think you guys are better, but for everything else I use Bing.