walkman - 4:49 pm on Sep 23, 2011 (gmt 0)

@albo
briefly scanning the webmaster sites yesterday, it looked like a PR tool from Google was trying to desperately direct webmaster's attention from the Senate hearing with all these Q&As and other tricks. Pretty pathetic, but it shows that they are scared to death. They know they did wrong and they are afraid that webmasters will start looking at Google's practices very closely and write to FTC, Congressman, Senators and state officials. Imagine if webmasters asked loudly that Google identify it's products as ads, or Adword customers legitimately complained about the ads looking like normal results, costing them money?

Google was pushing the 'we create jobs' but what if we told our representatives how many jobs Google lost with Panda, to increase their earnings? Or by overcharging for ads due to tweaks and monopoly? How are they helping the economy? These are the facts and legitimate concerns that Google is scared to death of.

It's not too much to demand that Google identify ads on top clearly as ads. If you bid your name /trademark you lose money when searchers think it's a normal SERP due to Google's cooking of the colors.
It must be a mistake anyway, transparency is one of Google's main virtues. It says so right here [investor.google.com...]

And of course, despite all that they're doing, they still want to be the center of attention from the Webmasters. If 'we' don't talk about ranking high there, they are done.