It’s no secret that Google is virtually printing money with its contextual advertising business. If you’ve read The Search you know that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were originally adamantly opposed to selling advertising alongside Google’s search results. It was only after Google developed a way to deliver advertising that was relevant to the context of a user’s search that Brin and Page embraced advertising as a business model.
With this in mind it’s kind of strange to notice that Google is currently running ads promoting the Da Vinci code on literally every results page, regardless of what is being searched for. Take a look at the bottom of the page, right below links to the ‘next results’.