PCInk - 1:53 pm on Nov 25, 2009 (gmt 0)

Well d'uh, this is AdWords, the whole point is basically the more you pay the more / better advertising space you get...

He doesn't mean that. At long time ago (10 years plus), there was no differentiation between the organic and sponsored results on most search engines.

If there was 50 advertisers and 10 results per page, the first organic result was on page 6 and there was no easy way to tell who was listed for free and who was paying.

Then, there was a fuss that they should tell the users which results are paid for and which are free listings. This is when we began to see more organic results appear higher to make the search engines look like the 'good guys'. This is the reason that Google and others put "Sponsored Links" on the adverts and have them look slightly different.