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Google Mulling Video Ads In Search Results
Bombula writes to let us know that Google is "finally succumbing to the power of the almighty dollar" and getting ready to implement image and video ads in sponsored searches.
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Finally "succumbing to the power of the almighty dollar"??? They gave in to Mammon quite a while ago.
Google displays video ads within a few different AdSense units. I've regularly seen video ads filling 336x280 ad spaces. Putting video ads in search results requires no technical advances. It's more a matter of laying out the search results to achieve the best balance of ad screenspace and content screenspace. So far, Google has done that pretty well with text ads in their search results.
If there's any news in this, it's watching the semantic argument that should result. People love to quote Google's tenet of "do no evil" and accuse Google of violating it wheneverGoogle opens up a new avenue for earning money. But it's not necessarily evil. It's just something they disagree with. And it's interesting, from a sociological perspective, to see how people can regard the opposing party viewpoint, in what are essentially minor disagreements, as "evil".
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Cool for them, now can someone recommend me my new search engine?
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
Now we can be notified about special offers and promotions that are disturbingly close to what we actually want!
--- We need more Ron Paul!
On a personal front, I will be pissed if I have to watch a video just because I searched for my favorite item.
Here's a more accurate title for this topic:
Google Mulling Over Giving Up Its #1 Search Engine Spot
Seriously: video ads? WTH?!
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
If they put flash ads in, the only result will be another result in my adblocks blacklist.
text adverts are fine - they are unobtrusive most of the time ( apart from those linky popup-ads which i dont think google do ). Image ads are reasonable if static. animated ads are a no-no and video ads you can just forget about.
They both figured out how to speed up searches and slow down the speed for search pages to load. I guess that's what passes for progress these days, two steps forward and two steps backward.
That's evil. The rest is icing on the cake.
Google is "finally succumbing to the power of the almighty dollar"
The dollar is quite the temptress and very deceitful. Following the money has led many to the path of destruction. The record companies have tried to collude and through artificial scarcity kept CD prices way above reasonable. Sales have fallen as a result of completion even though i Pod sales skyrocket.
Google has command of the advertising market. If they follow the temptress and try to follow the money, then Google will become just another search engine.
It would be sad to see Google become another ad-laden site with no special attraction to the users. Is Google stupid enough to ditch tons of eyeballs to get a slightly higher price per ad?
Others are ditching the overburdening pages and imitating Google's success. Most of these pages now don't load their page with banner advertisements anymore and for good reason. They lost major market share to Google because of it. They have modeled Google.
http://www.altavista.com/
http://www.dogpile.com/
http://www.live.com/?searchonly=true&mkt=en-US
http://search.yahoo.com/
http://www.hotbot.com/
If Google gets tempted by the money, they may find themselves quickly in the company of almost dead search engines that they stomped. They know how the other search engines dropped to obscurity. Why are they even interested in putting on that well known way to the bottom of the search engines.
The truth shall set you free!
That I have google ads blocked as of now.
Sure, their text ads were the least evil of all ads. Too bad it didn't last.
I'd hate to see the video ad for a misspell of "My brother's ex with a goat".
Google are a listed company - their main purpose is to succumb to the power of the mighty dollar - I'm pretty darn sure that the shareholders weren't under the impression that they were donating to a charity!
There is some impression that having better than average PR -ie writing intelligent blog entries / Apples Steve Jobs writing smart open letters means that they are genuine and open and not out to make lots of $$$ - this isn't the case!
Use Opera and add an "enable plug-ins" and "enable GIF/SVG animation" buttons at a convinient spot. I can't really understand why websites use flash or gif animaitons in their articles or news, it makes everything look very messy and unprofessional. Feels like a Tabloid magazine with TV-shop running in the background.
Teasing the nobles, and rightfully so!
As long as AdBlock shields my eyes from such crap. Honestly, does any out there like video ads? For the past several years, people have been doing everything in their power to skip or fastforward through video ads...
I haven't blocked google's ads yet. I will block any flash ads.
Web pages are static content, like newspapers. They are not TV. You put these things at the top of a page, they make it very difficult to read a page. I used to have to put my hand over them because it was so difficult. Can you imagine trying to read a newspaper with the ads blinking and moving?
Yes it will suck to have yet another popular site with annoying video ads that probably take priority when the page loads. But there is something you can do about it. There are browser add-ons that block such unwanted stuff. I mean, I haven't had a single banner ad interrupt my browsing on /. or any other site in months!
The game.
who take money from Microsoft and play anti-Linux FUD on the front page.
Thing is, most Slashdot users don't even see it.. thanks Adblock.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Not me, I have Flash disabled unless I'm expecting to see/use it, so unless Google moves the entire search result system to Flash I'm not going to see anything, that is if they use Flash to display the video as I expect.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Look again, they have had ads forever with search results, top and on the side. Or do you mean you block all of them?
No, disrupting my web browsing is evil, no matter whom the source is.
I consider all of the following disruptive:
1. In Your Face animated ads (subtle ones are OK)
2. Anything that makes sounds.
3. Flash Ads. I especially hate the Intel "follow the cursor" ads.
4. Ads that pop up when my mouse moves over a word. Chances are if your site does that, I put it on my personal blacklist.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
... like the damned interweb isn't slow enough already. I thought the point of broadband was to have more interwebs faster, not to have the same interwebs at the same speed. Guess I was wrong.
:P
Give this crap a few more years and video ad penetration and prevalence will be even worse than it is on television. At least TV doesn't run their ads embedded in the content.* And the comic books I read have the decency to run the ads in the back or not at all (I pointedly do not buy anything that runs ads inline - if it's something I want to read I'll wait for a trade paperback).
Looks like Google is increasingly flexible about the definition of "don't be evil."
* Network popunders popovers are one thing (it's the net shilling its own product, after all) - I mean, like, a frigging Preperation H advert and a Depends advert running on opposite sides of the screen while you're trying to focus on Battlestar Galactica or the weather report or whatever.
Oops, I forgot to list the one that may actually be relevant in this case.
5. Any search result that looks like a normal search result, but is in reality a paid search result.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
So we see yet another round of people getting riled up for google for breaking their "don't be evil" policy. Just what the hell is this so-called policy? How do you quantify "evil"? How much more should you go through before you realize this motto is just what it looks like - fluff?
While you may consider someone murdering your kith and kin, and running away with all your life savings to be pretty evil, this may be a great money making tool and perfectly acceptable for some companies.
I hate being involuntarily subjected to video, e.g., in the dentist's office, the airport, and the supermarket. The good news is that when it comes to ads on web sites, the power is ultimately mine. When a lot of sites started using animated GIFs, which I found distracting and annoying, it motivated me to start using adblock. When I came across a site that used those incredibly annoying adbrite ads, that motivated me to add adbrite to my adblock ads (http://*.adbrite.com/* is the pattern that works). If google is smart, they'll serve up their video ads from urls that fit some pattern like http://video.googlesyndication.com/*, so that users will be able to block the video ads without blocking all google ads. I've never been annoyed by a google text ad, so I've never been motivated to block them. I wish I had the same power to get rid of the TV ads in the checkout lane at Albertson's.
Find free books.
annoying flashing crap is why i stopped using yahoo. google can kiss my traffic byebye if they think i'll put up with the same. there's 100's of other engines ready to take up the slack, trust me.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I fully agree with what the parent said. Flash Ads are evil.
Right now, I still don't have Google Ads blocked because I don't mind text ads, or even unobtrusive banner ads.
Flash is an entirely different story, as it starts sucking up CPU cycles.
I don't remember whom The Register uses for their ad network, but I blocked them explicitly because of those annoying Intel ads with the dogs/cougars/whatever looking at the mouse cursor as it moves around the screen because:
1. It's distracting.
2. It actually slowed things down on my computer. To follow a mouse cursor around the screen.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
According to traffic analysis by Google Inc there has been a remarkable resurgence in the use of Lynx. In unrelated news, GOOG trading down.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
When they start doing that is when I start using Adblock on Google as well. Up to now I've excluded Google as I felt the ads were unobtrusive. Once they cross over, I'm nixing all of them.
Remember... the search part is ancillary to it's actual economic function. I'd start calling it what it actually is: Google! The Ad Delivery Engine!
That is all.
It's OK to be importing an unprecedented amount of Chinese goods and exploit the cheap labor for every other aspect of the western economy, but Google is evil because they set up a satellite search service that institutes the required Chinese national policies?
Since the suppression of information is happening regardless of Google's presence, that should clarify that the root of the suppression is not due to U.S. companies agreeing to Chinese government demands, but is the Chinese government itself.
Frankly, it's also better for U.S. interests to have a "bubble" of Google servers that have a set of blacklisted/censored material for the time being, instead of watching Google lose out entirely in the fastest growing economy to the Chinese domestic engines (e.g. Baidu)
These politicians who (while it was a popular subject) wanted to crucify Google don't have any qualms about continuing to support China by importing their cheap goods and exploiting the cheap labor costs.
Hypocrits.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo. -- James Klass
Why would you need condoms or viagra if you're searching for porn?
Google's text ads were the one argument that made any sense against using Adblock. If all ads are obtrusive, there's no reason to not block all of them.
Arent all gods fictional?
I think it will be more like embedded youtube video which means it won't play unless you find it interesting and click on it. I don't feel the need to be change my search engine just yet.
I'm the product manager responsible for the way ads look on Google. You will not be distracted by image ads or video ads on Google search results pages. Period.
Just because other companies use image ads and video ads with the _purpose_ of distracting users doesn't mean Google will do that. Images and videos can be useful and entertaining, if you see them when you want to see them. It's taken us a long time to figure out how to do it right.
BTW, how many _years_ do we have to be in business before people learn Google isn't motivated by short-term greed? Yes, we want to make money. We want to make money 10 years from now. The only way to do that is to build great products that people want. I think we've done a pretty good job of that so far, and we're not planning to stop.
One more reason why I have the Flashblock plugin installed in Firefox.
I'm burntout with all those image ads, and yet google ads have never bothered me. Google may be alienating the surfers with that plan.
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
If you consider something that "disrupts" you to be "evil" than you sure have a fucked up sense of morality. I tend to reserve evil for things like, you know....murder, torture, rape, oppression. Interrupting you, or even myself, for a few seconds is pretty far down on my "evil" list. Annoying, sure. Evil? Give me a fucking break.
Evil has become the new Web 2.0...a completely meaningless word that is used at the most inappropriate times.
http://watching-eyes.blogspot.com/
Text ads are harder to block with adblock and noscript. Videos, flash, and graphical banners will be trivial to block. I hope they get rid of text ads so I never have to see ads on google.
Just because there are worse things in the world don't make the small ones immune to evil.
You can't take the sky from me...
Do you go home at night and bang hookers on piles of $100 bills?
Because my scale of irritation goes something like:
0. relevant stuff.
1. text adds.
3. graphical adds.
10. animated/video adds.
11. People using add instead of ad.
And don't EVEN claim to have meant "additions" or I WILL unleash Hell.
No hyperbole at all, annoying you while providing a freel, arguably indispensable service is 'evil'. So now what word are you going to use for something well thought out and utterly horrible...evilsquared? Geez, tone it down a little, people. Evil is about the strongest word we have for bad behaviour & intent, applying it to frigging web ads is a bit much.
CustomizeGoogle is a special-purpose ad blocker for Google search results. You can turn off "sponsored results", for example. If Google goes over to the dark side, tools like CustomizeGoogle can be used to filter out the ads and dreck.
So there's a backup plan in place if they go evil.
Nearly all of those disappear if you use the NoScript extension for Firefox. It disables Javascript by default, so in-page pop-ups don't work. You can configure it to block Flash unless you click on it. Ditto for embedded sounds. The only other form of animation is plain GIFs, and a visit to about:config setting image.animation_mode=none can disable any movement.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Indeed they are hypocrites.
That doesn't necessarily make them wrong, and doesn't absolve Google.
Google is unwilling to risk losing the Chinese market, and will do plenty of evil to keep it.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
As with many things, there is a FOSS solution, http://www.mozdex.com/
*intellitxt* in adblock seems to work.
This sig all sigs devours
it is something of a misunderstanding. However, the term is bandied about a lot on the interwebs in reference to technologies, and people will use words in the context they experience them.
I doubt anyone would say a flash advert is evil in the same way as hitler was. Its a matter of scale. Pong and Unreal 2007 are both computer games games, and can be spoken of using some of the same words (multiplayer, zero sum, graphical). The magnitude differs is all. A flash advert that winds you up by forcing iteslf on your attention when you want to read an article is going to engender feelings of irritation, and possibly discomfort as it tries to wrest your attention from the content you visited a site for.
I, like many people who routinely use firefox addons, never see these adverts. If advert producers found a way to force me to experience them then I would start thinking the ad providers themselves were a tad on the evil side. Not in a big way, but in a 'wrecking my online experience' way.
News like this makes me glad that I'm stealing from the internet with AdBlock Plus.
Thats all well and good, we've all got to earn a living. However, I hope they give the option to turn off video ads and replace them with images/text. Otherwise you'll see a big migration toward Yahoo from the dial-up users (and no, a lot of the world still uses dial-up, look at the 3rd world countries)
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
You forget that Google will probably still have cracks, whether on purpose or not, that information gets through. A filtered internet and search service is better than none at all.
I wouldn't say Flash ads are inherently bad, only that most current Flash ads are bad. It is possible to create an ad, using Flash, that doesn't violate your other rules: very subtle animation, no sound, no cursor following, no popups.
The same idea applies to other uses of Flash. Most of the people who hate Flash do so because it's so often abused to do horribly obnoxious things. (Here on Slashdot, there's also a significant minority who hate Flash simply because it's not Free Software, or because the Linux port isn't the latest version, or some technical reason why it doesn't run well on their machine.)
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
They're a business. A profit-making enterprise. There was no point at which they did not care about the "almighty dollar." By using one type of media instead of another in ads, they are not somehow becoming more greedy or more evil or more Satanic. They'll show these ads, and if it increases their profits, they'll keep showing them, and if it decreases their profits, they'll remove them.
The summary for this article is basically a troll, intended to give people the feeling that Google is somehow surrendering to evil, just because they decided to try a new type of advertising.
Given Google's track record of some of the best and most non-intrusive advertisements on the web, shouldn't we at least let them try it and see how it looks before we criticize them?
Do you seriously think Google meant "evil" as in Hitler or Jeff Dahmer or Vlad the Impaler? They used it in a very common way, which in their case "don't be evil" basically meant "don't be a bad internet citizen."
Language changes, deal with it.
The clean minimal look was always Google's unique selling point. The fact that that're going to add clutter and bandwidth wasting junk is the start of the end of Google's popularity.
So, if I consider someone donating $1 to a charity "good," is my sense of morality still fucked up? Evil and good are not absolutes.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
If you don't mind paying and getting commercial software on Windows-get Ad Muncher. The most comprehensive adblocker I've seen-it can filter any application and is tiny and easy to use. It passed the ultimate test for me-running an unpatched IE6 on a bunch of warez/porn sites and nuking nearly everything off the page. Yeah, i live dangerously
For the rest, there's always the Adblock Plus extension for Firefox. I've been filtering ads for years because they're all US centric and I don't buy stuff online anyway.
There's no point linking the 'do no evil' slogan to their ad policy. They showed text ads till now as a differentiation from other engines, at some point they gave in to the lure of the cash and decided to go all out with video ads. Or they must have deduced that showing video ads is profitable. As a publicly owned company, whose primary goal is to maximize shareholder value, what are they doing wrong? (Too bad if you thought of them any other way)
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
I've started to look for a replacements to Google services. I will not nay I cannot use sites that make noise. I thought everyone realized that sound was evil during the pre-blog personal homepage boom. If a site makes noise without me telling it to make noise (youtube, cnn.com, mp3 sites, et al) It shouldn't make a peep. The last thing I want is to have my NPR feed covered up or interrupted by some ad. Google can use video ads all they want but don't make them audio/video ads. I remember when AIM put audio/video ads into the chat client. I'd be sitting there having a peaceful and silent conversation only to be scared when my computer started talking. The first few times this happened I fired up ad-aware, spybot and my AV software to check my computer for something wrong. Further I would imagine this would make their wireless customers angry since they have a certain amount of bandwidth that a Google search will start to eat pretty quickly.
Evil is not really the opposite of good. Evil implies a larger distance from the middle than good does. I certainly wouldn't suggest your morality is fucked up, but if you referred to donating $1 to charity as saintly or selfless, I would definitely question your perspective.
Although, another poster said that evil has become a watered down term, so maybe my antiquated understanding of our language is the problem, not other people's perspectives.
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
Google won my heart by proving that non-annoying ads could be wildly successful and profitable. Google has always been a favorite of mine because the pages just give you what you want without all the extra crap. Compare google.com to yahoo.com for instance. Simple and to the point. While dilluting the page content with moving stuff and chewing up my bandwidth with videos and animated gifs isn't evil, it will likely make the GOOG less desirable to me. What might make me feel like it's evil is that it's a betrayal of the rampant support I've given them over the years. *shrug*
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
... well, a new search engine will inevitable come up then. Google's algorithms were not _that_ great anyway.
Sign me up - there's no way MSN will ever go evil on us ...
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
I completely agree here. Part of why I began using Google so much in the past was because of how streamlined and fast it was. I've always liked adsense, and the color-coordinating text-only ads along the perimeters of websites, lying unobtrusively in wait for me to CHOOSE to look at them. Video ads, flash ads, and other types of hey-asshole-look-at-me gimmicks are what regularly drive me away from websites. It is disappointing that Google feels that direction is a good one for them. Why not stick to what has made you so successful, and seek profits in other avenues? I think the majority of net users could do without more animated nonsense cluttering our browsers.
if you browse with Elinks
I choose friends for sigs
at the expense of the rights of people?
Strawman argument. You brought up cheap Chinese goods and labor, not I. I am in no way defending the exploitation of the chinese worker.
Fact: Google actively filters information on behalf of the Chinese government. The great firewall of China was built with American technology. Google is a part of that.
If you'll refer back to the link I posted, you'll see that at least a few members of the US Congress do not believe Google's behavior is in the best interest of the US. Chris Smith went so far as to propose a law to make Google's actions there illegal here. (Of course, his hypocritical solution allows for the filtering of content in the United States to continue, yet would make filtering the exact same material in China illegal.)
In game theory, it seems you would consider the situation a deadlock. I would consider it a prisoner dilemma. I believe human rights are more valuable than money. You must consider money to be more important than human rights. The mods seem to agree with you. Perhaps you and the mods would like to sell your rights... or is it only the rights of other people that you consider to be less important than money?
You can thank almighty capitalism for that. Chinese currency manipulation is largely to blame for the "cheap" goods and labor. What follows that is inevitable in a free market. Spineless politicians are more deserving of blame in regards to "one way" free trade with China. In effect, China is exploiting loopholes in a debt based global economy in an attempt to dominate said global economy.
I wouldn't call this language changing. I can honestly say, outside of Slashdot which represents an extremely tiny portion of the overall population, I've never heard to any form of advertising being referred to as evil. In-fact, the vast majority of things that are referred to as "OMG teh evil!!!!" on Slashdot, most people don't...well, give a shit about.
Besides, Google's "Don't be evil" slogan is marketing, that's all. It's an attempt to paint the company as more of a charity and champion of consumer rights, and the fact that anyone actually buys into it is astonishing frankly.
http://watching-eyes.blogspot.com/
Ummm...since when is good the opposite of evil, as another poster pointed out?
http://watching-eyes.blogspot.com/
Since people started defining things as good vs. evil.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Good points! On the flip side, here's what I consider reasonable. (Reasonable = I won't stop using your website)
1. Ads that don't overlay other content (even if I accidentally move the mouse over them)
2. Ads that don't slow down page loading and viewing significantly
3. Ads that don't mess up the page flow so badly that I'm searching for the next paragraph of real content
4. Video ads, if used at all, should only start playing if I click a clearly marked play button
5. Flash ads, if used at all, should only have moving content/changing colors if I hover over them
6. No sound ever unless I press a very clear play or unmute button