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.

Comments

The top ads are the worst

[fulldecent]

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...