I just noticed that if you search Google, you may or may not actually get a display of Sponsored Links in the results. It appears as though if there really are no matching Sponsored Links, they won’t just display some unrelated links. Searching for “no ads here” (at least right now) gives me a result page free of Sponsored Links. Same thing with a search for “Jeremy Zadowny”. (Though Google suggest I might be looking for “Jeremy Zarowny” which I find slightly amusing, since a search for “Jeremy Zarowny” has no results. (Again, as of right now… give it a few hours…) Of course if you spell Jeremy’s name correctly, and search for “Jeremy Zawodny”, you’ll get better results… ;)
I’ll leave it up to you to decide if Google is evil, but not showing totally unrelated Sponsored Links when they could seems like a non-evil thing to do… Oh, and as a sidenote, I’ve been using Yahoo! Search more than AlltheWeb lately…