So, today, when I searched for a notary public in my area, expecting to have to trawl through yelp or angie list type crap to just find a local place, and instead I was pleasantly surprised with an ad for a place very close to me that offered everything I needed (I needed more than the notary service), they were lying to me? Odd, it sure seemed legit.

I know what you mean, you are talking about the 'soapX cleans brighter!" which of course is a contentless sentence intended to deceive, and I am with you there. But I think what is awesome about things like Adwords is it gives the small local business the ability to reach the people that are looking for them. Instead of dealing with some horrible chain I ended up at a tiny mom-and-pop shop, found out they had other services I've been looking for unsuccessfully, and now they have a guaranteed customer in me. I think that is great for me, and great for them, because they only paid a tiny amount for my click, and got a customer from it.

It's not perfect; I've just done several searches just to see what will turn up, things like 'kayak rental half moon bay' and such, and am not getting very good ad results. But sometimes they are spot on, more spot on than the google search results.