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Thanks for the question - I believe you're referring to 'site links', which are the listings below the natural result that give more detail about the site and save users time so they can quickly find the information they're
looking for. They actually aren't based at all on any revenue generating equation; paid and natural links are considered separate (think editorial vs advertising).

We only show sitelinks for results when we think they'll be useful
to the user. If the structure of your site doesn't allow our algorithms
to find good sitelinks, or we don't think that the sitelinks for your
site are relevant for the user's query, we won't show them. Note that we only display sitelinks when a site has a minimum of
three sitelinks available. At the moment, sitelinks are completely automated, but in the future, we may incorporate
webmaster input.

If you think that the sitelinks displayed for your site are
inappropriate or incorrect, you can block them so that they no longer
appear.

To block a sitelink, first ensure that you have verified ownership of the site. Then:

1. On the 'webmaster tools dashboard' (within www.google.com/webmasters), click the site you want.
2. Under Links, click Sitelinks. If we have sitelinks information for your site, we'll display a list of sitelinks.
3. Click Block next to the sitelink you want to
   remove. Please let us know why you want to block the sitelink - it will
   help us improve the way we generate and display sitelinks.

Hope that helps clarify site links!

Wow sounds like an interesting new application you're launching! While many people think about Google as a pure consumer service, the fact is that it's a great medium for the B2B audience as well. In fact, we were just named the #2 B2B advertising medium from B2B Magazine's "Media Power 50" -- just behind the WSJ. We're really excited about this!

The approach I would take is to strongly consider what marketing outcome would be viewed as a success. Are you trying to drive leads? Do you want people to sign up for a webcast/white paper? Do you want them to take a demo of the new product? Or do you want them to buy something on the spot? From there you can devise your search strategy. The question becomes, what keywords would lead people to this outcome? What is each outcome worth to me? (Hint, again, analytics can help with all of this!). And if Google can send lots of traffic that converts at the appropriate ROI, then maybe you'd be willing to continue advertising.

But Google does give you the ultimate flexability to set up your campaign, and your budget, to fit your needs. So while $15,000 might be the total opportunity, you have the ability to spend as much or as little as you care to. Google allows you to set a 'daily budget' that won't be overspent - and it can be as little as $10 / day if you just want to test!

While this is not my area of expertise per se, I do know that Google and most other search engines use links to determine
reputation. A site's ranking in Google search results is partly based
on analysis of those sites that link to it. Link-based analysis is an
extremely useful way of measuring a site's value, and has greatly
improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more
importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.

However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of purposefully buying
and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the
links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their
sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of
Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's
ranking in search results. You'll notice that Google does not allow anyone to pay their way into our natural search results -- just a part of our core belief of objectivity.

So while I can't comment specifically on comparison sites, the above hopefully give you some good guidelines.

We're going to give Jon a 5 minute break to rest his fingers and to stretch his legs.

Community, great job posing such great questions. Send more if you haven't submitted one already. If you have, thanks! Jon will try to get to it as fast as he can.

Thanks for your questions! Let me try to tackle them one at a time:

Google Finance: First, you should bookmark the Google Finance blog at http://googlefinanceblog.blogspot.com/. It has all of our significant announcements and new developments. You may have seen Google Finance launch with an incredible charting functionality, that now has been copied by most of our competitors. The use of AJAX technology (think dragging the map or chart) was revolutionary! Since then, we've launched enhanced features for the serious trader including the overlay of information like news, dividends, splits, trading volume and after-hours trades. The next phase is possibily to tap into the collective wisdom of developers and traders to enhance the features we bring to bare. You can imagine this is not as simple as it sounds though, with data agreements in place that cover only certain use cases. But stay tuned - Google Finance has a lot more to offer!

With regard to opening up the search algorithm, please check out the most recent post from our VP Engineering Udi Mander, who is in charge of Search Quality: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/in
troduction-to-google-search-quality.html . We're definitely interested in doing many of the things you mention!

Finally, that was an interesting article you referenced; while I can't comment specifically on all of the things highlighted in that article, I would refer you to our search quality engineer Matt Cutts, who has his own (authorized by Google) blog where he posts many of the same themes, or at least our take on them! www.mattcutts.com/blog/. This site can also help wiht question #2.

Good luck!

Your question gets to the heart of search quality - for advertisers! In general, we do not allow the same company to serve up two identical ads with different domains. If those situations are found by users, competitors or our policy team, they will be 'linked' -- meaning that those two ads can never show up at the same time. Because some people try to take advantage of the system, we don't always catch it right away, so we rely on users and others to help monitor this policy. But if an advertiser purposefully does this several times, they will not be allowed to set up a campaign again. The caveat is that one affiliate can run at the same time as the parent company, as long as the domain is different. Additional affiliates would need to be linked ...

It is critically important that our ads are as good as our natural results -- they should be a service to the user. If you see things that seem to comprimise the user experience, contact us!

Keyword prices are an interesting concept. Most of our clients monitor them, but only in the context of how they are affecting their allowable cost per acquisition. If keyword prices go up, but conversion rates on the backend go up by the same percentage, they are less concerned than if kw prices go up and conversion rates go down or stay the same. Several of our customers do use 3rd party companies like keyword spy, although big advertisers will often use a company like Efficient Frontier who will plug kw pricing strategies directly into their account and adjust bids on the fly based on performance.

We plan to bring more transparency to the bidding process in the future, so hang tight -- we know you need that!