...yet you're not only reading, but even posting here?

Re: the article, while I normally simply use google because it works well enough, I've always been underimpressed by the quality of the advertising links; the article's "bottom feeders" sums it up quite nicely. In general advertising is ignorable; it's too irrelevant, and half the time involves trickery, but if that advertising is actually relevant to what you're looking for, then by all means I'm for it - for the relevance directly, and because it also supports the free services and allows them to improve (while google's adverts aren't top notch, their other services at least give it a good go, at 0 cost to the user).