For a ton of people, the ads Google sells are very useful. The ads make their products visible. It's weird (do you often click on ads?) but the effect exists, some customers do come this way. Businesses, big and small, readily buy ads.

This is what powers their empire, not selling phones or even GCE. Search is but a delivery vehicle of ads, maybe one of the most powerful but not the only one.

(Disclaimer: I don't buy or sell ads, and run an ad blocker in my browsers.)

I don't think I've ever clicked on a banner ad. I don't even see them, as my brain just treats them as a featureless background.

This is what I noticed to when I had to disable the ad blocker on some sites.

The ads are annoying because they break the reading flow (I think it is called parallax when the ad moves with your scrolling, but slower - I hate that).

My brain just compensates to keep z smooth reading peace but I have no idea what the ad is about.