I saw an explanation of Google's success

Context
I'm reading Jeff Jarvis's What Would Google Do? As you might discern from the title, this is a book analyzing Google's business success and suggesting what other businesses could do to emulate them. According to Jarvis, one of Google's chief strength is its ability to leverage communities and their data to deliver outstanding advertising packages.

Commentary
As I told my husband, What Would Google Do? is a palette cleanser after having read Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur: how today's internet is killing our culture. It's funny, before I started I would've sworn I had much more in common with Kenn's viewpoint than Jarvis's, but I found The Cult of the Amateur to be a nearly unreadable elitist screed, while What Would Google Do? is a well-reasoned, thought-provoking treatise.

Not that I agree with all of it. I understand that Google has revolutionized advertising and made it, for perhaps the first time, a viable way to make money off the internet. However, I'd like to point out two things about advertising:

1) It's annoying. In fact, I think I can make a case that Google's famous "Don't be evil" motto is violated every time they run an ad.

2) It's hard to do well. I'm on the internet a lot, because I use it a lot for my work. I see a lot of internet advertising, and most of it is bad. Here's what I define as bad internet advertising:

1) It advertises something I would never buy, like life insurance.

2) If I did ever consider buying the type of product or service advertised, I wouldn't pick this particular one, because the content of the ad seems untrustworthy.

3) The advertiser seems to be trying to distract me from #2 by using cheesy, distracting graphics (shocked babies, dancing women, etc.). Apparently, some of them use sound as well, but my work computer is always muted, so I'm spared that.

The ads that appear on Google itself may fit #1 and #2, but never #3, so I'll give them credit for that. But the prevalence of ads on other sites that do fulfill all three make me question whether "becoming a node for advertising" is the panacea Jarvis seems to think it is.

In fact, it can backfire badly: when I'm on a website, if it has the 1-2-3 punch of bad advertising, there's a good chance I'll think the site itself is disreputable or failing economically even if I like the editorial content. If I decide to not visit anymore, the advertising has hurt the site's long-term bottom line while giving it a short-term injection of cash. Everyone can be harmed by their company they keep. Even Google.

What did you see today?