What is the difference between paid and organic search results?

Search results in the most popular search engines are broken down into paid and organic results. Organic search results appear in the middle of the search results page. These results are determined based on the search engines ranking algorithm with the most relevant results at the top.

Paid search results display advertisements from advertisers that are relevant to the keywords being searched. They display at the top and right hand side of the search page. These results are based on the pay per click (PPC) advertising model.

In the image below, organic search results are highlighted in red.