I don’t Like These New Google Ads…

In the past couple of days I have seen some new Google ads that look like this:

I have clicked on several of these ads more or less by accident, finding out that they are ads only after getting to the “landing page” with the actual revenue-generating ads. I assume that the site owner doesn’t get paid unless I click twice — once to get to the landing page and then again to get to an actual ad.

I don’t like this at all.

On the one hand, Google’s targeting algorithms seem to be working really well, since the text links appear to be very relevant to the containing page.

On the other hand, I didn’t think that I was clicking on an ad, when (in fact) I ended up doing so. I realize that there is that “Ads by Google” text to the left, but forcing me to check the visual context of a link to make sure that it is not an ad seems to be misleading.

Does anyone else find these offensive or misleading?