Brin and Page had put their finger on the Catch-22 of the search business: if results improved so much that they became uncannily accurate and precise—like a chess computer arriving at the single best move for a certain position—then advertising will have lost much of its purpose. You would be shown where to go based on the consensus “best result,” and thus should have little interest in hearing what an advertiser wanted to tell you. OK, there might be a few ads to introduce a new product, or to try to persuade you to switch between brands, but this wasn’t the basis of growing business. A search engine needed to sell something valuable—like reaching customers in a way competitors couldn’t—if it wanted to make a lot of money. The bad incentives were clear: search companies would stop trying to improve their services for business reasons, which is why Page and Brin toward the end of their paper made the following assertion: “We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.”