In reply to Lee Hodson.

Who decides what is an ad and what is a useful notification?

Sign-up forms are notifications too. I don't class email sign-up forms (even as pop-ups) as ads. I don't like them (don't know anyone who does) but I appreciate a site owner may want to display them.

Already we have two opposing definitions of what an ad is.

I would rather Google let me decide for myself what I want to see when I visit a site (within reason, e.g. provided the content suits my search).

you can rearrange my furniture all you want, I suck at it. I am being very serious.

Too lazy to do my own. Someone else can put in a bid to do that for you.

Google has every right to tell people what sites to visit and what not, hence why a site will be shown first over another site for the same keyword(s).

Not really. Keywords (less important now than overall concept theme of the content) enable Google to match search keywords with page keywords and thereby 'hopefully' list pages relevant to someone's search. Some filtering is required but Google does not tell people which sites to visit. Google presents a list of sites to visit and tells web-masters their sites may not show in the list if they do not follow Google's rules.

Some of those rules I won't argue with. No spam sites. Good. No plagiarized content. Good. No artificial backlinks. Good. No hidden text. Good. Quick load times. Good. No malware. Good. Telling people how many ads they can place, where they can place them, what features are allowed on a site and how to design their sites. Questionable.