You are taking for granted that when you don't search for something
you don't get ads. But that's something that's very specific about standard that was set by google with its non intrusive ads.
Most of the other commercial sites, including search engines, were filled with blinking banners trying to sell you anything, even if you just searched for boring entomology.
(The same pattern is repeating with ads in mobile aps btw)
Watching TV you are bombarded with ads you don't care about, consuming your time and infiltrating into your mind. How can this possibly compare with "80% OFF Hotels" message appearing when you are indeed searching for hotels. How can this fuck your brain? Most of anti-ad ideology comes from that aspect of ads, which cannot be applied blindly in this context.
I rarely notice search engine ads, unless what I'm looking is really something I'm expecting somebody to advertise and I'm actually searching for that thing! (you named hotels....)
Why not?
Now please tell me what exactly is broken with this way of advertising.
What damage does it cause? I'm all ears but please articulate your concerns and give examples.
What I want is that access to information is unbiased. I want that people around the world, no matter what is their income can know about stuff, have access to scientific education, and stuff like that, and this is basically how things are. Yes it works.
I've met a guy from remote african viallages, who self learned to be great developers (I mean great, not good). The knowledge wasn't blocked. There were no companies able to pay google to show only forums behind paywalls (like experts-exchange) basically cutting off people which not only don't have money but have no practical way to obtain credit card.
And I'm sure that many companies would love to be able to do that! It would be great for them; just provide a site which offers some paywalled content and pay the search company to provide only links to them whenever this keywords come (and prune the normal results).
Now, that would be search bias! I never saw anything like this with google or bing. Please point me to an example and I'll change my mind.
> Google makes most of their money in finance, insurance, e-commerce, hotels and the likes. Try a keyword and see
What do you think would end up in the search results when you search for hotels?
You will find the same old crap of booking aggregators and resellers and cheap offers whatever. That's because the content is what it is. Companies would do nasty tricks to end up higher in that free-open search engine, exploiting fake content (I mean, there is already plenty of that stuff already, so I guess you know what I mean).
Is that what bothers you? Or the list of ads in the rights side?
Are we talking about the same thing? Search bias = bias in the search result, not the ads side bar, right?