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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."
On the upside, banner ads will be pretty easy to target to make never appear with plugins.
..don't panic
It's not evil to have a banner ad. Right, shareholders?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
If I go to Google and search for Southwest Airlines, I plan to visit the Southwest Airlines website. Why would Southwest Airlines pay money to Google for an advertisement that tries to get me to visit the Southwest Airlines website?
Could we fix this? What if nobody bought stuff from the companies that advertised on the banners? I can dream, can't I...
and start being evil, or at least really really annoying.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Go ahead, add the banner ads.
I already block google analytics at my firewall. I'll just block these with something.
Google just seems to constantly get worse over time.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I thought Google had at least 10 more good years before the corporate culture take over completely.
"Dear Human Products,
Google will be placing large, targeted ads across your search results.
Thank you for your personal information.
Do Know Evil,
Google
Trolling is a art,
Google's business has always been ads. I really don't see how static banner ads are any more evil than text ads, especially when they're just running them on search results. The only way it's really any worse is that it's mildly more distracting and takes up a trivially larger amount of bandwidth. There are other competitors who don't do this if it bothers you, or you can just Adblock them. I'd be more concerned with the targeting they're probably doing over this because that's something that's arguably evil. Now if they started allowing Flash ads or ads with movement, that would bother me, sure.
From the movie, Little Big Man: "Land that would be theirs as long as grass grow, wind blow, and the sky is blue."
Yeah. Uh huh. Suuure...
I'd rather have banner ads than have 3 or 4 ads at the top that are almost indistinguishable from the search results.
On the subject of aggressive advertising...
It feels like YouTube ads have become much more common and obnoxious in the past few years. Has anyone else noticed this? I used to be content to click on a YouTube link but now each time I do a cost-benefit calculation -- is it really worth sitting through 30secs of irritating car ads or whatever just to see this little funny clip of two kittens and a tortoise? (or other material :) ).
Usually for me, the answer is now "no".
Remember,
"First Do No Evil, Unless It's Profitable"
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I was just in a google hangout using it as a video conference. During that conference call a particular service was mentioned. I had never heard of the service before, haven't searched for it, and yet mysteriously I'm seeing ads for it pop up all over the place undoubtedly served up by Google.
Makes me wonder....
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I have set up my DNS to block lots of places that have abusive ads (like Flash, animated GIF, etc). It seems that once I did that, almost all the other ad places disappeared, too. But if a web site hosts their own ads for themselves, they can get through (hint to Slashdot admins).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I'm the author of Ad Limiter, which blocks most ads in search results from Google and Bing. By default, it lets just one ad display, the best one based on our site legitimacy ratings.
So this is something else to identify, rate and block.
(I'm surprised that Google is getting into banners. Targeted search ads are much more valuable than banners. Banner ad click-through rates are so low as to barely be measurable.)
https://duckduckgo.com/
See how their ads work here: https://dukgo.com/help/en_US/company/advertising-and-affiliates
(To summarize, they are usually fine - usually 0-1 clearly marked sponsored results per page)
For many people, they simply don't understand the difference between putting a website address in the address bar and in Google's search. This leads to competitors buying ad space on the search results, hoping you'll also check out their brand.
This is a major problem with non-technical users trying to find the phone number for technical support and finding shady service companies pushing yearlong contracts. Try any AV brand + support or phone, and you'll see many other companies offering "Support for X" and making a killing.
the Google exec who wrote the no banner ads promise was Marissa Mayer, now CEO of Yahoo.
That says it all, really. She has a knack for these things.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
The other day I also noticed their text ads sometimes now have contact forms in them with my email address pre-populated. In response I turned off the option in my ad blocker that allowed their text ads. Advertisers are idiots.
Remember - One word = 1 milli-picture.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
"Could we fix this? "
Yes, start install adblock plus on every single computer within your reach. Only you can stop web advertising.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
one of its users' heads is tapped lightly.
Sorry that was totally gratuitous M$oft bashing. I'm sure the company they bought that made Bing had a lot of smart people.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Please add a feature to let me change the background of all AD's on google so they are obvious to older people.
Now that's an interesting idea. We dim out lower-rated search results slightly, but it's so subtle visually that few people notice. We certainly could do something to make it easier to identify ads.
They're not that intrusive and they help website make money for their employees. Now, if it turns into some clickwhoring site where the webpage is 75% ads and 25% content, that's different.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Ads ain't evil, they just really annoy me. And Google should know this. What is top plugin for their own browser? What is the main reason people root android? Right, ad blockers. They should know people HATE ads. Hate them with a passion that causes them to foam at the mouth at the slightest exposure.
And frankly the ad-blockers I have installed work well enough. So far the battle between advertisers and humanity is going fully in favor of humanity.
Until recently google seemed to accept that a portion of their users had the skills and desire to block all ads and let them get away with in exchange for market share. They were not going to be able to push ads on these people but at least they used their services, enabling them to grow as a company and then sell ads to those that don't mind them. (Just as slashdot allows contributors to hide ads).
That changed, ad blockers are banned from the android store. So I use firefox mobile and install a plugin for that browser and don't run programs that use ads. And waiting for a moment to root my new phone.
They are not going to push ads on me but I am perfectly happy to instruct everyone around me how to block them. Fight me google and you will find millions of nerds telling all their friends how to block them. You want to fight us? We made you what you are, we can kill you just as easily as we killed altavista. Reduce you as Yahoo has been reduced. Do you want to join the ranks of AOL?
Then keep your ads to those that don't mind them.
You would think that a company that offers their own phone to offer customers a clean phone without vendor or phone company malware would understand this. It seems sales has overtaken google as well.
Look at what happened to other companies were the sales guy was not killed when he utters the words "I got an idea". Your making billions google, be happy with it. Because there is no way in hell I am going to watch your ads. Ever. I and countless other rage filled nerds will see you dead and buried first. We did it before and unlike MS, we can do it again.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I am lazy but when with the same amount of effort I can install a program that blocks all ads, why the hell would I use your program?
That is like being to lazy to scratch your ass but when you do finally scratch it, not scratch it enough to kill the itch.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Now someone else can come along and replace Google, they have a great pitch. "No banner ads!"
People will still continue to search even though Google places banner ads all around. Look at Youtube, the ads placed there are a nuisance (for me) but it didn't stop people from watching videos. If you don't like it, suck it up. Since you'll still search from them anyway.
So pretty much unless another competitor challenges Google, they can pretty much do whatever the want.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
Use Adblock Edge.
Never forget, Plus allows "some ads" by default...
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
Please you dumb pleb. Real men use assembler for all their computing needs, including blocking IPs. Hosts are implemented in OS that's written in wasteful crap of higher level languages.
Nope, it's coded in higher level language used by plebs unlike assembler that does it all better and more efficiently. But you plebs want to make things comfortable and easy instead of powerful and hard. Like ones that use adblock instead of maintaining hosts files, or using higher level programming languages instead of assembler code.
And assembler does far more than C when done right too.
My point, which you keep walking past is that messing around with hosts file is significantly more complex than just using adblock if all you need is ad blocking functionality in your browser. It's like writing software that can be comfortably written in C in assembler instead.
Not complexity in computational terms, but complexity in terms of end user action needed.
In other words, it's managed by a user.
Adblock's lists are managed by adblock automatically with zero input from the user.
The difference is monumental, and your refusal to understand it is hilarious.
And it is people like you who claimed that nokia's old symbian phones were "superior to iphone on all levels".
That didn't end well either. Better luck this time.
It must be a nice world to live in. I wish I was in the same world as you are, where truth, facts and logic rule.
In real world on the other hand...
You live in the imaginary world where humans are machines driven only by pure machine logic. I live in the world where humans are humans and when they hear "update with notepad" they turn around and walk away. And they are right - they have far more valuable things to do with their time than learning niche skills like that.
Because if they didn't, you'd have nothing to eat, no clean water to drink, no power to run your computer, no roof over your head and your problem would be protecting yourself from wolves. Because people who focus their time on doing all those things would be learning how to "update hosts list with a notepad" and other similar niche stuff. For which they don't have time or interest in normal world, because they actually have to do all those other tasks that support the current way of life among humans.
So welcome to the real world mr. ubernerd. It's not a nice place, but it lets all of us live together in fairly comfortable way. Because when they want something done, they don't learn the convoluted techie way, but just click on button to install an add-on and let that manage everything automatically on background with zero input from them.