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Google Cleans Up Search Results By Ditching Sidebar Ads (theverge.com)
Mark Wilson writes: Google generates a huge amount of revenue through advertising but it's not afraid to try mixing things up a little. Ads in search results have long-been controversial, but the latest change is likely to go down well with many people -- the ads that currently appear in the right-hand sidebar of search results are to be dropped.
The change means that ads will only be displayed above and below search results. There will be seven Google AdWords ads in total -- four above the search results and three below. The right-hand side of the page will be left free for Google's own Product Listing Ads. Google also confirmed that the change is global and affects all languages.
The change means that ads will only be displayed above and below search results. There will be seven Google AdWords ads in total -- four above the search results and three below. The right-hand side of the page will be left free for Google's own Product Listing Ads. Google also confirmed that the change is global and affects all languages.
I am addicted to love!
From a user's perspective, isn't the sidebar an ideal place for ads so they don't mix in with search results?
I think that the issue is that a lot of them were getting repetitive. I research a lot of products at work and regularly click on the ads in addition to the search results. The ads are usually pretty relevant and in some cases better than what the search terms are providing. But I was noticing that a single company's ads might be shown 2-4 times across all of the locations. I can see how that could cause issues.
that look like search results? Sounds like a negative.
"The right-hand side of the page will be left free for Google's own Product Listing Ads. "
... will be replaced by a different type of advert? That doesn't exactly sound like Google is ditching anything.
So the ads in the sidebar
I remember at the very first of the year Google was trying something new. The number of advertisements before the search results had doubled. I was pretty pissed. Apparently so were a lot of other people and Google listened because I don't think it lasted more than a week. There are already posts below this that mention the sidebar is actually an ideal place for ads because there is no room for confusion, and that this might be the reason they are "dropping" them. After all, the ads must still be present somehow. The fact of the matter is, Google's bread and butter is advertising. It is what they do. There is likely no perfect way to insert ads into Google search results, yet they still must do it for the sake of their bottom line. They have no choice (awaiting arguments against that statement). All I can say is at least they try mixing things up from time to time to make things more palatable (awaiting argument against that wording). I personally believe online advertising is a far less effective than consultants numbers say kind of deal, and that eventually companies will figure that out and there will be a bubble burst. I see an eventual future with far less advertising that costs more but is also more effective over the current situation where we are faced with so many ads, even if there is something in there of interest, they are often overlooked as they all drown each other out. I can say this. I am sick and tired of searching for something oddball on a whim and then having "related" advertising follow me for the next five years. We should at least be able to opt-out of some things. Amazon is even worse about this.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Google is becoming more and more abusive.
Google has been so abusive with Android that Samsung is making its own phone operating system.
New owners: this sounds like a puff piece for Google, put in front of slashdot readers without explanation of why this is in fact better, just singing its praises. If you don't intend to run the site this way, now would be a *great* time to comment saying so. I'll take the absence of an authoritative response to mean you intended this or at least don't care.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
I've never seen any ads on Google. The right hand side is completely blank. Are there people that don't run adblockers in 2016?
So anybody have any before vs after pics?
:)
In particular, I'm wondering if we're going from 1-2 in-line ads and 1-2 sidebar ads to 3-7 in-line ads. (In other words, is this "cleaning" just an excuse to put more ads in-line with the search results? Let's not forget this is Google, who won market-share in part by way of putting ads on a noticeable yellow background. Anybody noticed the background colour for ads these days?
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
It's been tough to push myself away from Google, to using (hopefully) less evil and intrusive alternatives like DuckDuckGo and Ixquick. But moves like this will really help me kick the Google habit. Thanks a lot, Google!
Rule 35 of the internet: "If it can be hacked, it will be". - Charles Stross
Dotty has a cuckoo.
Guess I've used adblockers for so long, I've never noticed any.
...to head off those court cases where various people and countries suspect that Google is giving its own products "undue prominence" in search results - by putting their own products in a separate column to the right (and perhaps then dialing down alleged prominence algorithm) they're now no longer in violation of anything
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
and Overdrive ads.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Will they also be using a large green arrow so I can immediately get the software or movie I googled. Those are really helpful when they are mixed in with search results.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I run a website, it is called acls.net. Lots of people compete with us.
Sometimes we will get a customer on the phone that got our phone number from a friend and they want to login and buy our course. I tell them to type acls.net into the address bar. Just explaining where the address bar was hard enough. One older gentleman finally types it in and guess what... he lands on our competitor's website!
So then we go through this again. Type it in... hit enter... and then same result. So what happened is this guy is getting to the Google search results page and our competitor created an ad with the headline "acls.net". Luckily I figured this out, then just told him to click on acls.net that is green.
Turns out this guy is color blind. After 15-minutes of him patiently and whole-heartedly working with me, I could not get him to navigate to our 8-character URL website. I printed out the page and mailed it to him, and he mailed me a check for about $500 to sign up.
This is a real story, honest. Now think about how much money my competitors want to pay Google to make sure the customer that DIDN'T call me ends up on their site...
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
Now if they'll ditch that useless, waste-of-space left sidebar containing that "Anytime" crap, then allow us to disable suggestions, and auto complete and ... just about everything that doesn't work w/o Javascript then the various Google pages may be usable w/o me having to use NoScript, and HTTP (through Proxomitron) to make it simply palatable. Seriously, having it shuffle words with every character typed is so fucking annoying (and a waste of bandwidth) - their keystroke analysis be damned.
All I want is a simple, clean entry form where I can think and type in peace until I press Enter.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I've not seen adverts there, or pretty much anywhere, in years. I don't care so much about advertising but they are pretty much the most active vector for viruses to infect your machine... so no. No thanks.
Those are the ones that get people. I've had to clean more than one laptop of fake antivirus programs that I traced back to ads on Google search results pages.
" likely to go down well with many people "
Why?
I never look there anyway.
Does Google have ads? I've never seen any.
First they moved the search options from the nice blank space to the left of the search results to a pulldown that make you use 2 clicks rather than 1, and now they're getting rid of the stuff on the right, presumably for a "cleaner" look. Which leaves most people with who have a reasonable resolution monitor with more than half a page of blank space for every search.
Google used to work for usefulness and usability. Now they're in their own world where they make changes rather arbitrarily without much user feedback (its nearly impossible to actually give feedback to Google, and if you don't log in, it may be impossible) and most often I find that they make the usability worse, just for the sake of change it seems. Within search, Google Patents, Gmail and other of their services, they've made changes that have made usability poorer repeatedly. Its sad that they are big enough that they don't need to keep doing things well and can just do them by fiat. Apple's been in the same boat for the last few years.
And its really too bad that nobody's coming along with products that give the old functionality, because I and I'll bet many others would happily move to a better choice - Old google search functionality was great, and if I could get that search with a more functional UI without it trying to outsmart me about what I'm searching for, I'd be really happy. DuckDuckGo is a good start but its search is not as functional
#rhs_block, #tvcap, #taw, #tads, #bottomads, td.Bu.y3, div.nH.adC, div.nH.PS, .action-menu, .clickable-dropdown-arrow {display:none !important;}
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
The right-hand side of the page will be left free for Google's own Product Listing Ads.
So they are not ditching ads on the side of the page at all, like the summary claims. Plus, it's Google. They'll likely change their mind in about a week and ditch the search results in the middle, leaving the entire page for Google+, soon to be replaced by Google++.
FWIW, I've been a web designer/developer since 1993, and this seems to confirm something I've long noticed on my own sites: Sidebar ads don't work.
Sidebar ads have steadily decreased in effectiveness for the past decade or so.
Meanwhile, we get a lot of clicks on horizontal ads -- especially Google Adsense responsive ads, set near the top of the page (above the "fold").
In my experience, we currently get over 1,000% more revenue from horizontal ads (responsive, near top) than vertical ones (300 x 600 ads in sidebar). I suspect this is mostly because we read horizontally.
I hope advertisers take notice.
A page with video advertising may cause one to waste gigabytes of data! 1. When an advertisement is playing on a page it draws data from some source. The advertisement may be visible or not. If it's not visible what is the benefit to the viewer? NOTHING! So stop any and all video advertising that is not in the visible page. 2. When one is viewing a page with video advertising and one is drawn away from that screen for whatever purpose, the bytes are continuously downloaded to run the video, whether the person is viewing the screen or not. If one is no longer viewing the screen, called away to go pick up the kids, clean the dishes, go shopping, fix the car, whatever - the video continues to play again eating up one's valuable and expensive bytes. Especially video ads that are not on the visible page. There should be some time limit or byte limit on video advertising so that one's allotment of bytes downloaded from one's ISP is not drained by some video advertisement that one is not watching and has no way of watching because one is NOT THERE!
Google worries about ad blockers - then turns off all bar the most obtrusive positioning of their ads.
Google search ads were occasionally useful. Useful enough for me to want to keep them there. I actually clicked on them when looking for stuff to buy. But then they moved them to the top, then altered the colours so they were barely distinguishable from real search results. That was when I turned on ad blocking for their search page. I guess I could have just blocked the ads at the top and been happy, but it was too much work. Now the option is gone, so procrastination won the day!
If Google wanted to treat me like the customer instead of the cow to be milked they would ask me where to display the ads, and we would both win. As it is I get an ad free service and they whinge about ad blockers. Some things are just inexplicable.
When there's StartPage DuckDuckGo? Why though?
Never saw them???
In fact I can't see any ads anywhere. Is my internet broken?
Try it! Library of Babel
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* Accept NO substitutes - it removes all ads, ALL the time & isn't paid off by advertisers NOT to (+ it does a whole lot more for security, speed, & reliability too)...
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APK
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APK
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... apk