And yet if I were in the market for a [paid] flow charting package I would immediately look at the ads first, as in my opinion those ones would be the highest quality packages. I might also trust the first few organic links, but why bother when there are so many professional competitors vying for my business with the ads?
Funny, I would do the exact opposite - completely ignore the ads and look for experiences of the users, reviews or really anything but the ads. How does buying adwords correlate with quality?
If the software company is large enough to afford a marketing team to fill Google up with ads then there's a good chance the software will also have big dollars spent on it.
Contrariwise, if the software you're looking for is already large and complex (driven by the nature of what it needs to do), then ads will mean nothing because they will be expected.
While on the other end of the scale with small purpose-built apps you will deliberately ignore ads since you won't want any bulky bloatware that can afford adspace.
The ads are just another cost to the business, so that flows on through to the buyer, either through:
- higher prices
- worse customer service
- fewer features
- the company eventually going under as they get priced out of the ecosystem
You won't find many subjective comparisons & reviews of players in the ads (it will all be companies selling themselves) and you probably won't typically find any free or open source software either.
The ads are just another form of search.