Compare September 11 PPC Ads vs SEO Results

It is already 5 years since September 11, so today I did a search on ‘September 11′ on MSN. It yielded over 35 million search results in which I found the following sites were within the top natural search results.

september11.archive.org
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11
www.september11news.com

The only exception is the one PPC ad that was shown on top of all the natural search results, which has nothing much to do with the September 11 incident in 2001.

September 11 Search Results on MSN Search

I remembered once I had an argument with a very SEO savvied friend on the top PPC Vs SEO, whether PPC is better or SEO is better. The conclusion is simply that SEO is virtually free and it requires time to get good results, while PPC gives instantaneous results and the PPC ads can go on top of natural search results if you do it right, though it can be very expensive with competitive keywords.

The good thing is that on Google there wasn’t a similar PPC ad on top of all the natural search results. I don’t have anything against MSN search which I do use from time to time, but I’m just concerned is it a way to give users a bad experience and at the same time give away users to other search engines?