"Yes, being the first paid result will often produce too many monkey clicks and reduce your ROI. It's been that way since the beginning of AdWords. But are you equating the 3rd position on paid results to the 3rd position on free results? As I read it, the Senators were not speaking just about paid search results. And 3rd is worse than 1st on organic (free) results. In fact, I'd need to see this list of terms and how they were queried to see if it was even valid. Did they perform the searches without personalization turned on?  Danny Sullivan did a great piece earlier this year on Google's 'favoritism' in search results. http://searchengineland.com/su... But simply doing a bit of due diligence right now on some of the terms in Ben Edelman's 'research' show that Google is not pervasively third." - AJ Kohn