Do search engines intentionally make organic results less relevant than paid?

[Kristijntje]

Interesting article on the blog of soon-to-open comparison shopping engine Jellyfish which raises the question of whether search engines intentionally make organic search results less relevant than paid search results in order to boost click-through rates on paid results.

I wonder, is this web spam actually bad for Google? And are Google (and Yahoo! for that matter) really out to get the SEO industry (like posts here and here indicate)? Do they really want to destroy SEO as a whole or even the worst kinds of SEO like web spam?

Maybe not. Google may take some action here and there, but I believe that they actually like a little mud in the main organic results for commercial terms. Why? Because less than stellar organic results (from practices like web spam) mean higher CTR’s on their paid links and more juice for their quarterly earnings....

full article: http://www.jellyfish.com/blog/2006/05/04...relevance/

related topic on Google's problem with spam:
Is Google's Search Index Falling Behind Due to Web Spam and Hardware Limitations
http://community.tuliptools.com/index.ph...622.0.html