I do paid search for a living, and it has been fascinating to watch the evolution of the SERPs.<p>This one is a big step backwards IMHO.  For many queries now, the first page has essentially become an interstitial.<p>I have to say I feel it is quite &quot;un-Googley&quot; in the sense of the search team&#x27;s balance against the AdWords team. Many people like to rail against Google for various things, but historically they&#x27;ve always done a pretty solid job of maintaining this internal balance.<p>Some will argue that &quot;if the results are relevant to the query, that is all that matters.&quot;  But this is going a step too far in that the only results are the ones paid for, which means there is another factor beyond &quot;relevancy&quot; at play (despite how CTR impacts Quality Score).<p>All of this is on top of advertiser concerns that CPCs are likely to rise as a result (which I agree is likely to occur). While not the case for my account in particular, the net result is also likely to make it harder for small local advertisers to compete on the paid side when they are up against large national advertisers.<p>Personally, I&#x27;m going to focus on beefing up our Bing presence and other non-paid channels.  Diversification is important, and ultimately there&#x27;s not much that can be done about it.  Businesses will continue to pay the CPCs they can afford until they are no longer profitable, and then they won&#x27;t.  Those who don&#x27;t diversify will suffer the consequences of putting all their eggs in one marketing basket.