AGAIN, please don't bother replying to me with stuff like "oh, there's this extension to fix this kind of site problem" or "oh, there's this hack to solve that kind of site problem". I know the workarounds. I don't CARE about the workarounds.
I care about all the people who have to deal with problematic site design who use them AS IS and get screwed up as a result. Workarounds and hacks just give developers an excuse not to fix their sites. We need to be thinking more about nontechnical users stuck with this stuff -- and less about our own clever techie tricks.
@lauren ... which reminds me. Purely as an experiment / finger-in-the-wind, I need to figure out how to carve out some time to make a Chrome Extension to put a yellow box behind every ad result.
@mtomczak I doubt that *any* ad highlighting methodology would satisfy the haters. I still have to deal with people sending me claims that G mixes organic results and paid ads without labeling the latter as ads. And when I point out that every ad and/or set of ads are labeled they seem oblivious. HOWEVER, the recent deployment of infinite scrolling SERPs is resulting in ads that appear to be embedded amidst natural results. This seems more problematic without more obvious highlighting.