Google Testing Banner Ads On Select Search Results

cagraham writes "Google promised in 2005 to never "ever" put banner ads on their search results, but that appears to be changing. The company confirmed to SearchEngineLand that it is running a "small experiment" involving large-scale banners on searches for Southwest Airlines, Virgin Atlantic, and Crate&Barrel, among others. The ads are being shown in less than 5% of searches, and only in the US, for now. Interestingly enough, the Google exec who wrote the no banner ads promise was Marissa Mayer, now CEO of Yahoo."

Comments

RIP Google, 2014?

[xtal]

On the upside, banner ads will be pretty easy to target to make never appear with plugins.

Re:RIP Google, 2014?

[pmontra]

It seems there are many Geeks around. Adblock usage was 9.2% overall in US and Europe in 2012. See this PDF link for details. Well, maybe there aren't so many geeks but they install Adblock on the computers of friends.

Re:RIP Google, 2014?

[melikamp]

Thanks, but I got a user-friendly fork that was created with the intention to fix what Palant has broken. It does so by not exploiting the end user. It doesn't have an "acceptable ads" option, so I don't need to uncheck anything.

Re:when you become a monopoly you can relax

[Nerdfest]

So putting up an advertisement on a free service is 'evil' now? Google makes their money by advertising. They provide a free service for you and pay for it by selling advertising space to others.

Re:when you become a monopoly you can relax

[TheGratefulNet]

its NOT a free service; they make money off of selling YOU.

what part of that don't you understand??