Well, there's a distinction to be made between "web search results pages" and "image results pages," "froogle results pages," etc. From what I can tell, Marissa Mayer's comment only addresses the homepage and search results pages.

With that in mind, the NYTimes isn't necessarily wrong about logos and graphics. And Google's left itself quite a bit of wiggle room...

They said no banner ads. They did not say no graphic side ads. To me banner ads are the ads at the top of a page. Maybe I'm wrong? I'm I'm not it would seem that Google are playing semantics.

Sensationalism. Google? Banner ads? Give me a break.

New York Times. Wrong. That would never happen would it?!? ;-)

Hey, if you rearrange the letters you get "monkeys write". Even if they didn't specifically, say no graphical side ads at all, I think it would go against their whole philosophy to have flashy graphic ads and would cause them to lose a lot of business, because many people use them for the clean, simple site that isn't overly pushy on advertising. Google seems to believe that the less "in-your-face" advertising is, the better it works.

If Google starts with the ad crap, it will only be a matter of time until everyone quits using it and migrates to a slower smaller engine. At which point that engine will grow to the size of the once giant Goolge--and so the cycle will continue.

People hate ads and news, thats why they love Google.