I work on Search Quality at Google. We have a firewall between Search Quality and Ads. We don't answer to Ads. Revenue is just not my team's problem. We come into work every day and look at our search results and try to get the most relevant answers ranked as #1, #2, etc. I never think about the impact of my ranking improvements on ads. I've been personally involved in dozens of changes, and I've never once heard anyone argue for or against releasing a change because of ads.
I can understand why someone might be mistrustful because of the apparent incentive to sandbag the algorithmic results. But Google has the long-term view: if we can keep satisfying our users' needs, the revenue will follow.