Very strange: can't get Google to show me ads at all no matter what I type, like "sofas" or "erectile dysfunction" which should trigger a bunch of ads. Perhaps ads pushed consider geographic location?
I live in Japan and "sofa" brings no advertisement, but "ソファー" brings three. So I guess it does indeed consider geographic location.
Wow! That makes sense. Sure enough, searching for "沙发" brings up three ads for the PRC market. Here I was thinking that Google scaled back their advertisements significantly, they are just more precisely targetted :)
Are you using Adblock?
In Chrome? I don't think so. I see no ads from Google at all, even if I try very hard. I am in the PRC market, which might have something to do with it, but even Bing will serve me ads if I switch to Bing.com.