Some might argue that Adwords got so successful because ads competed like search results, on bid AND relevance, not just bid.
If your ads inventory is big enough, ads can actually be a better answer to your intent than organic content, because the companies behind the ads have a much stronger incentive to satisfy your need.
Paid ads always negatively distort the results.
If AdWords or search consider both relevance and the fee collected, the end user will never be shown the most useful results consistently. If the goal was usefulness they would only pick results by relevance and take no fee at all, or take a flat fee that isn't based on a bidding system.