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An opinion piece recently appeared stating that Google “just flat out deletes queries and replaces them with ones that monetize better.” We don’t. The piece contains serious inaccuracies about how Google Search works. The organic (IE: non-sponsored) results you see in Search are not affected by our ads systems.

In particular, the piece seems to misunderstand how keyword matching is related to showing relevant ads on Google Search.

Ad keyword matching is a long-standing and well-known process that is designed to connect people to relevant ads. Learn more here:
^{[ghostarchive]} https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7478529

A separate process, which has nothing to do with ads, is used to match organic results to a query, as explained here:
^{[archive.org]} https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/how-search-works/ranking-results/
It’s no secret that Google Search looks beyond the specific words in a query to better understand their meaning, in order to show relevant organic results. This is a helpful process that we’ve written about many times:

^{[archive.org]} https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/how-search-works/ranking-results/
^{[archive.org]} https://blog.google/products/search/search-language-understanding-bert/
^{[archive.org]} https://blog.google/products/search/how-ai-powers-great-search-results/

^{[archive.org]} https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-breakthroughs-over-25-years/
This ensures that Google Search can better show people organic results and connect them to helpful resources. If you make a spelling mistake, or search for a term that’s not on a page but where the page has a close synonym, or if you aren’t even sure exactly how to search for something, our meaning matching systems help.