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Google Blurring Distinction Between Ads and Organic Search Results
jfruh writes "For years, paid links returned from Google search queries have been set off from 'real' search results by their placement on the page and by a colored background. But some users have begun to see a different format for these ads: a tiny yellow button that reads 'AD' at the end of the link is the only distinguishing feature. Google is notoriously close-mouthed about this sort of thing, but it may begin rolling the new format out to more users soon."
They've been on the slippery slope for a while now. Not exactly evil, but not forthcoming either.
Error reading device 'Signature'. (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?
Being a non profit non evil organisation does not mean that they can't have a few ad's here n there ..
If they start poisoning search with for-profit results Google will be quickly reminded that they are not the only search engine in town.
I don't know what they are thinking, but there is no brand loyalty for any web service. There is only usability and convenience. Sure, Google is convenient, but if they take a dump on usability #2 search engine will laugh all the way to the bank.
Inorganic search results
Am I the only one that thinks this makes it more obvious?
That's as bullshitty a term as it is in your supermarket. There *are* no "organic" results when they're calculated based on your tracking history, ad clicks and social connections.
Friends don't let friends get tracked. Use the quack that doesn't track!
The ad notation still seems obvious enough to me. Google is also known for efficiently using screen space and bandwidth. Small changes can have significant savings when you are dealing with things on the scale that Google does.
Then again it could just be some evil in the works. :-)
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
I'm in the test group.
It may be my eyes, the angle at which I use my screen, the brightness and contrast I prefer, or something else, but the background color has always been almost undetectable to me.
The new configuration, a simple yet obvious graphical element indicating "Ad" indenting the sponsored links, highlights them much more effectively for me.
+1 for this change.
Didn't Google just agree in a European Commission settlement to, among other things, make the ads more discernible from the search results?
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
Friends who are not my friends apparently want me to stop finding meaningful results.
DuckDuckDon't.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This article is completely ridiculous. Google was scamming everyone with their off-white beige box with almost no border that indicated an ad. Unless you were looking directly at it at a perfectly 90 degree angle, any low to mid grade LCD monitors would turn the color back to white. They should gotten a billion dollar fine for that. I know some many people who had no idea those were ads.
Now it's a huge, bright yellow button that says "ad." Isn't this part of their settlement with somewhere in Europe about making ads more obvious? This is court-ordered. This is not making ads less obvious, it's making them more obvious. Thankfully now all I have to tell stupid people is to look for the word Ad and ignore it.
This, at least, looks better to me than the ever-so-pale-background box, which I can barely see unless I'm looking at my screen from an angle.
Not that I ever see it anyway now, thanks to GreaseMonkey.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Did you even bother to look? There's no overreachtion here. I just ran the same query and saw the same thing. It's not an A/B test, and it's been this way for a while.
Because they are f***ing relevant!
heh, you must be new here. Overreation and car analogies are what powers /.
To detect the AD and color it's background blood RED. 90% of the ad's when you search for a program's name are scumware that pollute the users computer. Google knows this and they refuse to fix it because they make money off of it.
I really hope that someone finds a way to identify the ad's so adblock can strip them, or we can at least warn people away from them.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I started seeing this recently too. I don't recall exactly when, but I barely gave it a thought. Something akin to "Oh, Google changed their layout a bit." It's still quite blatant which items are ads, and I wouldn't consider the "ad" tag to be a "tiny yellow button." It sticks out like a sore thumb, and furthermore, just looking at the titles of those particular "search" results makes it obvious the first few are ads.
Interestingly enough, the new layout has actually prompted me to deliberately click on some of the ads I've seen. In the past, they were easier to not even notice by being off to the side. But now, I've seen some of them, and knowing full well it's an ad, clicked anyway because I was curious or I thought (rightfully so in some cases) that the ad would take me where I wanted to go.
This is already being abused by phishing and scam sites.
Search for the Car Tax, Driving licence or DVLA (UK Driving Vehicle licencing agency) and you see three ads for application scams sites.
The same for a UK fishing licence, or European Health insurance card.
Regardless it looks like crap. Altavista went into a downward spiral for precisely this reason. It used to be great but it stopped being great when you had to sift thought one and sometimes two pages of ads before actually getting to the result you actually wanted.
If Google doesn't deliver the results people are searching for easily we will just switch search engine again.
It's not increasing the number of ads, just how they are displayed.
Ah, I see the rumors of Francis Dec's demise were greatly exaggerated.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
are like that for a while..... That's how it gave me virus.
Bingo. A lot of people forget that Google was several years late to the search engine business. Google gained where other search "engines" decided to replace real results with paid placements. I recall a meeting with Lycos where a first page placement in their "search results" would cost $10k.
Yes, they got rid of the pinkish coloured background from top ads, and removed the separator from the side bar. But the ads are still separated by a grey line, have a yellow icon in front of the ad with the word "Ad" in it, and an exclamation mark in a circle beside the ad blocks. If you can't tell they are ads, you aren't paying attention.
If the first link is an ad and it's what I'm looking for does it matter?
How ads are identified doesn't matter when it is evident it is an ad. What matters is that I find what I'm looking for on the first page with the least amount of clicks. As a customer of Google I do not want people who are not looking to buy to come to my site. If someone is looking to learn about diamonds they most likely are not looking to buy. So a generic search of diamonds may lead to a page of jewelers a user would not click on any ad links but would refine the search. If all users are stupid and click on links identified as ads for jewelers then jewelers sales will not improve and advertising costs increase or be less effective, therefore they may stop advertising with Google.
In order for Google to continue being relevant they need to be relevant to people who search otherwise Google's product dries up. If ads are relevant then I don't care
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
I consider it an overreaction because the reaction is more against the change rather than to the impact of the change itself. I, for one, prefer the new mechanism. The main reason is that I found the grey boxes and light lines difficult to discern, particularly on poorly calibrated monitors (including some of my own -- I tend to prefer a high monitor temperature that mutes the contrast there).
The big yellow "Ad" symbol is much easier for me to identify. The yellow stands out. It's not garish; they could certainly make it MORE visible, but again, for me, personally, the yellow is easier to spot than the grey, and I consider it an improvement. Yes, I'd probably have preferred that they do both.
Anyway, I'm sure people will disagree, but people disagree on any change... it's not the end of the world. Ads are still labeled and people will get used to it then complain about the next change. That's why it's an overreaction.
I have not only noticed this with Google but I've also seen something similar on legitimate file download sites like FileHippo, CNET, and others. They plaster the site with download links and you might not actually be downloading the original file(s) that you have intended but adware. It's actually hard to decipher the download link that you actually want to click. I have lost count of the number of computers I've had to clean up because of this. It's really dishonest.
Use other search engines, other social media (like GNU Social), and let us take the hegemony out of the 'net.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
1. Google is a data driven company. They watch user behavior very carefully. If this makes money wihile costing very few customers it will stay. If they see people leaving Google for other search engines, the change will disappear quickly. People complain all the time about what they think their preferences are, and how they think they work -- when you look at real behaviors though, there is often a disconnect from what people say they will and won't do.
Everyone says, "I never click on ads." While it is obvious that someone does, or else they would abandon the ad model and change for the service.
2. They have not increased the number of Ads, or the placement of the ads. The ads still appear on the top of oragnic search resultss, are still identified as ads and not search results. Only thing that changed is how they are displayed .
I personally think the big orange "AD" tag is more visable than the light yellow/grey background they used before. You are free to disagree, but that is a matter of taste, and only data on people's actual browsing behavior will tell the whole story.
Anyone who can't see the yellow box with the word "Ad" in it shouldn't be in the Internet. My opinion on this, is that this new method actually makes it far easier to see which ones are ads, since each such result is clearly labeled right at the beginning of the link-out.
The people who would miss this or be confused by it are the same ones who'd already have so many infections on their computer from clicking idiotic things that it's unlikely their browser would even load Google. ;-)
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
People complain all the time about what they think their preferences are, and how they think they work -- when you look at real behaviors though, there is often a disconnect from what people say they will and won't do.
Everyone says, "I never click on ads." While it is obvious that someone does, or else they would abandon the ad model and change for the service.
I think Google's revenue extraction ideal is a presentation of ads that clearly differentiates them from search results but still leads people who avoid ads to click on them anyway when they aren't paying close attention. That's why the ad text and formatting matches the search results. A tiny iconprobably works better for that than a completely different background for most users. Shifting formats around occasionally probably helps too since people will eventually condition themselves to any given format.
As I think I've posted here before, the last three or four years, google results have been getting worse and worse - I regularly see things I've excluded with a -"search term" that have that term, explicitly, in the semi-para that's displayed, And the ads are *much* worse. I was looking for mens boots -ladies -women -womens (and yes, if you give or do not give a plural, the other will show up), and saw a sponsored ad for women's boots
ROI has definitely cut into usefullness. And why hide the advanced search?
mark
I click on ads all the time.
When I'm trying to do commerce, I find it a better experience clicking on the ad links. If a company is paying for ads, they likely also work on UX of their site too.
Car shopping? the first link is usually the manufacturers link, that's convenient too, and local dealerships. Perhaps that's blackmail though, because the first organic result tends to be the company too.
If people are willing to pay to give me information based on my search, there's a decent chance they have what I'm looking for, that's often a great way to find worthwhile links. This is all simply for when I'm looking to do business though, most of my searches don't apply.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
A yellow icon that is quite obvious, and an information button telling you why you got the ad?
It's pretty obvious even at a glance, in fact, I'd say the color that is distinct, and no where else on the page makes it easier to see.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Altavista... Now, that's a name I've not heard in a long time. A long time.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I agree that it is easier to see. I prefer a dim monitor and the yellow ad box stands out more. It doesn't appear that there any more ads than usual. I don't see the big concern.
I also thought most of the people on /. used some kind of Ad-blocker and/or no script that would take care of that anyway. I had to turn ad-block off to see the ads.
There is also the ads that are exactly what you searched for. Try searching newegg or jcpenny the first result is their site and it's tagged as an ad. If I search for ford service center the very first link is listed as an ad and it is also the place I get my car serviced.
Its quite clear what is going on, and the difference between honest results based on popularity, and paid results, based on how much you can afford to pay.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Have been caught several times by that damn firefox re-packager when searching for the mozilla firefox download. Their ad looks very similar to a legit search result and is at the top.
If ads started being served from the same domains as the content, web pages would suddenly be much faster. Mission accomplished.
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"There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever."
Marissa Mayer, December 2005
duck duck go!
"Evil man makes you kill me...evil man makes me kill you..even tho..we're just families apart.."
772876 < 956533, so you tell me.. :)
Hivemind harvest in progress..