I was there, I remember. When they announced the sponsored links in search results a lot of people were concerned. Google had only just started becoming the search engine of choice, with better results than we’d ever seen from engines like Yahoo! Alta Vista, Lycos, etc. Everyone was afraid the paid links would ruin the results and block out the actually useful information. For a long time that didn’t happen, but in the past few years the search results have gotten noticeably worse.