I'm wary of the methodology here. If a reporter typically on the google beat is doing searches from their account on "phones" after using the same device or account as the one they used to research for their last article on the pixel, it stands to reason google might put a pixel ad in there. I really do feel like this is being overstated; for example, I searched "watch" and received no ads for android wear at all, (mostly watches for women actually, which I recently bought as a gift).

That being said, the fact that this can happen at all is worth talking about. The magazine and newspaper companies didn't run hardware buisinesses on the side like this.

Edit: It seems like the third party SEMrush was used for the analytics, so that's certainly better than just typing it into google a bunch of times. I was being unfair to the WSJ. However I still can't reproduce the watch findings on their site https://www.semrush.com/info/Watch

Just a note that the article does say that once the WSJ brought this to Google's attention the ad results changed dramatically. So checking now is probably not representative of the state of things when SEMrush did the initial research.

That's probably the most interesting bit.

  While Google pays itself for the ads, the strategy does have a cost: Google forgoes potential revenue from ads it displaces.

I'm worried about the Google monopoly, but this in particular feels pretty reasonable to me. I don't see how it's disanalogous to a tv network buying ads on it's own channel.

I wonder what the effect is on AdWords bids for keywords Google is targeting. Does the average bid cost increase, effectively negating the cost of Google advertising on Google? (Thus due to economics, the ads become free, or reduced in cost).

Google has always shoved its own items above the real results before. Search for a stock quote and you'll get Google Finance and not the top result right under your search bar. The real top sites like Yahoo Finance, MarketWatch, etc. must hate that. Not that odd to see them displacing ads as well now since they already displace search results in their favor.

It's funny, I've switched to Bing as my daily driver, and I can't shake the feeling that there's a pro-MS slant to the results.

I feel like a programming search is slightly more likely to return .net results, or a charting question is going to have an Excel reference in the first few pages.

Wow, such a shocker! Who would think that a company would integrate their services into each other?

Everyone, thats why antitrust laws exist.