Yep. The original top ad unit had a dark blue background, plus I think some sort of “sponsored” text that clearly delineated the ads. It has since become almost indistinguishable from organic results.
Could be a lot of things, including wanting to buy a new car, yeah. But maybe I want to search for "new car smell", which is a thing. Maybe I want to read blogs or experiences people have buying new cars vs used.
Search as it is now is fundamentally at odds with us as our own agents. We're 30 years into the internet. I shouldn't just be presented with a magical search box that tries to figure out what I want and intermingles it with trash that makes them money and fosters a broken internet. Instead, I should get knobs, settings, configuration galore, include/exclude operators, filter lists, curated lists, sub-lists of internet sites, dynamic lists determined automatically by the search engine (only blogs, only forums, only search sites), etc. Who knows where search might be if we didn't have "magic" results from Google.
A good "taste" of what search might have been is if you look at Google's product or shopping search tab.
